Since 2023, MIT Sloan Management Review has published debates around the responsible use of AI (RAI). The debates were based on specific questions or statements raised to a panel of experts, who were asked to express and explain their dis/agreement with the question or statement (from strongly disagree to strongly agree). Our CEO and co-founder, Dr. Richard Benjamins, has participated in all those debates. This series of blog posts gathers his responses to the 14 debates held on RAI.

All blog posts in the series have the same structure. The title is the question, followed by the rate of dis/agreement, and the brief text is the position of Richard. Responses were limited to 1200 characters, so the posts are short.

This is the second post in the series.

Most RAI programs are unprepared to address the risks of new generative AI tools

DISAGREE

An adequate RAI program evaluates the ethical and social impact of an artificial intelligence system in a particular context, for a specific use case. In this sense, RAI programs are well-prepared to address the risks of generative AI, treating it as any other AI system used for a specific purpose. This implies that the same generative AI program used in different applications, will be evaluated several times, for instance, when powering a medical chatbot, doing question-answering (FAQ) for how to access public services, or when automatically filling forms.

However, a RAI program that evaluates the AI technology or algorithm without a specific use case in mind, that is, in isolation, independent of the specific use, is not appropriate for generative AI since the ethical and social impact will depend on the specific use case. It is therefore impossible to adequately assess the responsible use of the AI system; it will be either too restrictive or too permissive.

The full debate is available here.