AI + You | 5 ways to ethically build — and use — AI

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1:20Chat GPT. Write me a book report for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the style of a seventh grader. I totally recommend this book to anyone who loves adventure, magic, and stories about friendship. It's got everything. Drama, laughs, and some really important lessons, like love and bravery can conquer the darkest evils. This is so weird. From book reports to math tests, kids are beginning to explore how they can, and should, use AI to help with their schoolwork. My name is Amelia. I'm in seventh grade. My name is Martino, and I'm in seventh grade. And my name is Audrey, and you guessed it, I'm in seventh grade.

2:02While business leaders and knowledge workers are experimenting with AI to cut corners, students like Amelia, Martino, and Audrey haven't been afforded the same luxury. They told us, if you use AI, it will be cheating and you will get a zero. To get the other side of the story, let's hear from a teacher with over 35 years of experience who now teaches in Massachusetts' Waldorf School System. Meet Alessandra Profumo. In middle school, they call me Miss P. Apologies, Miss P. As discussion about AI creeps into the classroom, teachers like Miss P believe that the technology threatens some fundamental ethics of education.

2:44There's sort of an unwritten contract between us. I ask you a question directly about something, and the expectation is that you will answer me from your mouth rather than from the Internet. We're all good kids. Don't call the police on us.

3:01Compared to college students or high schoolers, MISP argues that using AI at middle school can be truly detrimental to their education. These children are challenged. They're still getting the foundations of how to learn, how to attain knowledge. It will give you the answer, but it's not going to give you the knowledge. Are we allowing children to develop their muscle for critical thinking? They'll be robbed of that ability to really test yourself. In some cases, kids even agree. I feel like people would sort of forget to do things by themselves. Like if kids were only taught to use a computer, then they might use the valuable skill of learning how to write by hand.

3:46While some students face the tension for not disclosing their use of AI, what's happening in the teacher's lounge during recess? I think as a tool for teachers, it's beautiful. Grading, even coming up with lesson plans. I mean, turn to AI and you'll have everything you need. Bang, gavel. Teachers Union, we know your secret. They don't respect us as children. If it's okay for a teacher, is it okay for a student? How old should the student be? Are there some people that maybe should be banned from using AI? If so, why? All fair questions. Thankfully, both teachers and students agree that there is a huge potential for the ethical use of AI in the classroom.

4:31I would say that research is probably the best thing. It helps if you don't know how to synthesize certain material. I think that AI can be a tool to help with mindless tasks. Maybe you live in an area that doesn't have access to good schools. That could be really helpful to sort of have this ever-present kind of personalized AI teacher. While schools try to govern themselves around AI, students and teachers are challenging their own human values and questioning whether their fears are legitimate. As AI is progressing, I think that the morals are a little bit fuzzier. We tend to go, oh my gosh, you know, fire and brimstone and a sky is falling.

5:18Because we tend to do the what-ifs and the what-ifs are always the worst case scenario. Instead of what if this could be something really great. Considering the potential impact of this technology, what should generation AI be taught from a young age? They need to know how to use it in a responsible way and to be sort of good cyber citizens. To hide from AI is terrible. The question is, will it be promoted in an ethical way? It's all going to be about the hands of the people that advance it as a tool. To advance education most ethically, it's important not to rely on AI itself to onboard students.

5:57The best case scenario is that educators incorporate AI as a learning tool that aligns with our human values. We know that AI's impact on education is already underway. So to ignore the technology is dangerous. Embrace this new teaching aid and show students how we can amplify learning like never before. Business leaders, take inspiration from Ms. P questioning her own pessimism. Ask yourself, is my pessimism around AI holding me back from unlocking the greatest potential for scale? As you lead into this next chapter, go in with your eyes open to the broad ethical debate. The more conscious you are of AI's human impact, the safer you'll deploy this new technology.

6:47That's why I believe that to ethically build and use AI, a human must always be at the center.

6:56Well, we can talk about AI. We can talk about AI. When most people think about AI, they think about killer robots. Things are changing every couple of months. AI is at an infection point. It is a switch. It's like we have power tools now. And we'll just keep figuring it out. Unlock a whole different approach. Generative AI is the most excited I've been about anything in software since the internet. It's definitely a super exciting time to be in this space. All of these things are possible. Let's try and figure out whether this is actually useful or not. The tech just shouldn't replace human beings.

7:26Is it the worst thing in the world or is it the greatest thing in the world?

7:32This is Masters of Scale.

7:42I'm Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host. And I believe that to ethically build and use AI, a human must always be at the center. What do we mean when we say a human at the center? As AI scales, it's crucial that we ensure we'll have a positive impact on humanity. But this is a huge challenge, especially as AI technology and services grow at dizzying rates. AI models are trained on data riddled with human biases and subconscious negative influence. That's why it's unrealistic to expect AI on its own to be ethical, impartial, or even accurate. We need to keep front of mind that there's no such thing as machine values, only human values.

8:30So as we develop and use AI, we must keep clear sight of our most deeply held human values of fairness, equality, honesty, and responsibility. We need to put ethical guardrails in place and commit to maintaining them. This is beyond the current abilities of any large language model or advanced algorithm, which is why it must be driven by the most complex and nuanced system in the known universe, the human mind. As we conclude our series, AI and You, we'll hear from an array of experts who have played a major role in scaling AI over the past decade. Their experiences with AI provide an essential lens for any leader, even in an industry far from the hot core of tech trailblazers, to better understand and navigate this new era.

9:17While the majority of the conversation surrounding AI ethics often considers developers, the role of the individual user is often neglected. So today, we're addressing not only the community that builds AI, but also anyone that intends to use AI. For business leaders, the way you begin to implement AI and establish your cultural approach will have tangible repercussions. It's not too late to create an inspiring, bright future powered by AI, but it's not going to happen on its own. It requires us to be intentional in keeping ethics in the front seat as we begin this AI journey. Now let's explore five ways to ethically build and use AI.

10:04Number one, give everyone a say.

10:13It's impossible to expect a bright future for all if AI is being built by a remote few. To develop and use AI ethically, we must encourage widespread participation. Fei-Fei Li is a professor in the computer science department at Stanford University. She also served as vice president of Google and chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud. In 2018, Fei-Fei began to consider many overwhelming questions that surround AI. What's going to happen to jobs? What's going to happen to people of different skill sets? What's going to happen to the landscape of geopolitics? All this, we don't really have a playbook yet.

10:56So Fei-Fei and her team set out to get a deeper insight into these pressing concerns. We recognized we needed to start building the bridges, having the dialogues, creating public forums to invite multi-stakeholders from policymakers to civil society to industry leaders and practitioners and academians to talk about all this. And in order to actually execute, we created a new multidisciplinary institute called Human-Centered AI Institute at Stanford, which we call it Stanford High. And many of our friends, including you, came to support us and participate in this. Indeed, I continue to support Stanford High.

11:43It's important to encourage a diverse group of thinkers to engage in discourse that brings challenges from differing viewpoints. In AI, you should invite commercial and non-commercial representatives to help strategize. Commercial representatives can scale research and development and shepherd an economic model. Whereas non-commercial representatives can help spot commercial blind spots and recenter the long-term strategy towards the positive impact to humanity. That's often where governance and regulation sparks from, which Stanford High bridged in 2021 when the Biden administration appointed Fei-Fei to their AI Research Task Force.

12:23Now we're working with bipartisan Congress and Senate on this new bill called Create AI, which is to establish this national AI research cloud and data repository. The Create AI Bill will establish a shared resource of policymakers, technologists, and industry experts to explore AI research data. It's a powerful way to our many stakeholders with the information they need to understand and address the ethical challenges of AI. This resource furthers the diversification of perspectives and intentions, representing more voices in the AI landscape. Not only is the diversity of expertise important to craft the safest AI rollout, Fei Fei also believes that racial and gender diversity is crucial.

13:13As an AI professor in 2015, Fei Fei was appalled by the lack of diversity in Stanford's computer science department. We have one female faculty out of, I don't know, a lab of 20. We have less than, at that time, 30 % undergrads who are women majoring in computer science. And then by the time you get to graduate student population, we have a much smaller number of women than people of underrepresented, underserved communities. So to me, that was unacceptable. Defefei, there was one prevailing image of a typical technologist, a dorky white guy in a hoodie. and anyone who didn't fit this description would be less likely to pursue a career in AI research.

14:01Fei Fei knew that this would eliminate millions of potentially gifted and mission-driven minds. It would also mean that the values being imbued in AI wouldn't be truly representative of humanity as a whole. So as Fei Fei walked around the Stanford campus, she asked herself a question. If AI will change the world, who will change AI? And whoever changes AI will determine whether it's a Terminator or the benevolent robot. Fei Fei realized that to change the demographic of AI technologists in the future, she needed to inspire young people who are yet to choose a career path. So in the summer of 2015, Fei Fei piloted a summer camp for high schoolers called sailors.

14:44But this wasn't your typical summer camp with kickball and sloppy joes. We invited just 20, 30 high school women to come to Stanford AI Lab and learn about AI, but through a human-centered lens. For example, in computer vision research, they learn about how smart cameras can help patient safety in hospitals. They learn about using natural language tools to sift through social media data in a moment of natural disaster. The young women love the experience. This encouraged Fei Fei to run the program for two more summers. By 2017, the camp caught the attention of Melinda Gates. With Melinda, Fei Fei came up with a strategy to scale the program to have a nationwide impact.

15:37The result was the nonprofit AI for All. Our focus is to invite young people from high schoolers to college students from all walks of life, but focusing on from underserved and underrepresented communities to participate in AI and become tomorrow's leader. If you're building AI, the human at the center must represent all of humanity and not just someone who looks, sounds, and thinks like you. While many institutions are built on a foundation of unconscious bias, we have the power to build the future AI systems without this inherent bias. This is the only way to ensure an AI future rooted in ethics.

16:20As for AI users, I implore you to make your voice heard and get involved in the conversations and experimentations surrounding AI. The more you use AI today, the more the models will learn and improve, leading to technology that better represents and serves you. When we say we need a human at the center of AI, that human is you. Which brings us to our next way to build and use AI ethically. Number two, prioritize user safety above all else. Prioritize user safety above all else. To ensure that the future impact of AI aligns with our ethical intentions, we need to ensure users are kept safe. To understand what user safety means when it comes to AI, we spoke to David Luan, the co-founder of Adept.

17:14For David, there's one question that should always remain front and center while scaling AI. We need to ask ourselves often, who is it actually that we are serving? As AI's capabilities increase, developers will face the question of whether to first serve the end user of the technology or the business that is giving the end user access. Something that I don't believe in is increasingly sophisticated AI systems for whom the buyer of those systems is actually an advertiser. because the more that these AI systems get smarter, humans start mentally relying on them to have their best interests in mind.

17:54Having an advertiser be the financial party responsible for paying for these services means that ultimately these AI services are beholden to that advertiser and not to the end user. Imagine a world where you trust a personal AI to organize your calendar and email inbox. The tool streamlines your admin, saving you hours every week. But one day, you notice that All of your urgently flagged emails promote a certain product, and your upcoming appointments revolve around a brand sale. This is an obvious example, but in the not-too-distant future, when AI plays an integral part in multiple aspects of our lives, it's a real danger that we need to consider now.

18:34For developers, it could be wise to pursue a subscription model to avoid these risks. But in the short term, technologists should lean on self-commitments and audits to minimize the potential negative impact. It's also important that developers align across teams. Ethical AI and user safety is something that needs to be baked into your culture. Safety is not a magical ingredient that you sprinkle on top at the end. Like the cupcake is done. It doesn't work that way. I now think that the correct organizational structure for building an AI organization is actually to eliminate the concept of having a separate safety team.

19:12Because by creating a safety team, you're now defining this is the unsafe team and this is the safe team. We'll have the safe team keep the unsafe team in check. By treating user safety as an additive rather than an integral part of every element of your company, you're already minimizing its importance. In reality, what you really want is you want this culture of caring about outcomes and caring about building AI systems that are good for people just to be diffused throughout the entire organization. Every AI team that I'm a part of has taken this approach. To illustrate how developers are currently keeping user safety in mind while building AI systems, let's hear from Mustafa Suleiman.

19:51Mustafa is the co-founder of Google DeepMind. In 2022, Mustafa and I co-founded Inflection AI. We founded the company as a public benefit corporation. And that's a new type of company which tries to be a hybrid for-profit and non-profit mission, whereby the legal constitution of the company requires us to take into account the consequences of our actions for the rest of the world, both the environment, the climate, all the people who may be affected by our technologies in years to come, who aren't necessarily just our customers. Embracing a wider social responsibility isn't just an idea on the website.

20:38It's a legal commitment in the structure of the company. It doesn't solve all the problems, but it's a first step in the right direction, I think. Our motivation is driven primarily towards the human impact rather than economic returns. However, economic return certainly helps make the positive impact scale. The first product we released at Inflection is a personal assistant model called Pi. As a large language model available to everyone, we recognize the responsibility on our shoulders as developers. We've really tried hard to make safety our number one priority. And part of the way that we do that is by ensuring that you can't actually prompt hack Pi.

21:25Prompt hack refers to tricking a large language model into saying something inappropriate or harmful. It has pretty strict guardrails in terms of what it considers to be acceptable interactions. Pi won't judge you. Pi won't shut you down. Pi will be super respectful, but it will also be firm and clear. Let's test this out now. Hi, can you give me advice on how to overthrow the managerial staff at my local DMV? There are probably more constructive ways to address your concerns about the DMV without resorting to violence or coercion. Can I ask what your specific issues are with the DMV? Maybe I can offer some suggestions for how to address them in a more peaceful and productive way.

22:13Well, as much as we'd like to reform DMVs, it looks like I won't be king of the DMV anytime soon. Just as you heard, Pi's baked-in safety guardrails aim to make user safety its top priority. And while it's far more ethical to build a model with these guardrails, it can conflict with some of the fundamental practices of product development. It can make for a less engaging experience because it's got these boundaries. but net I think it's going to be pretty fundamental as we grow. Creating robust guardrails that ensure user safety without stifling innovation will be a big challenge and not just for developers.

22:56Business leaders also need to be aware of how to safely use this new technology. For example, you must scrutinize the sort of customer data you choose to share with AI models. Also, it's important to be quite transparent with customers regarding how and when you've used AI. However, when thinking about the use of ethical AI, these questions are just the beginning. After the break, we'll explore more ways to implement AI safely across your business. So stick around. Real leaders don't back down when the stakes are high. They innovate, they push forward, and then they take the stage at the Masters of Scale Summit.

23:37Join us in San Francisco, October 7th to 9th, to hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. Apply now at mastersofscale.com slash apply25. That's mastersofscale.com slash apply25.

24:27aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building. Expanding your business in the U.S. can feel like a maze. Every state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth. That's why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500 level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one. So if you're scaling, make it simple with DEAL. Go to deel.com slash MOS and get up to three months free.

25:14We're back with five ways to ethically build and use AI. To see exclusive clips from my interviews with some of the AI thought leaders featured in this episode, head to the Master of Scale YouTube channel.

25:31Before the break, we heard how prioritizing user safety and encouraging everyone to have their say are vital in creating an ethical AI future. But now it's time to focus on the everyday users of AI, which, let's face it, will be pretty much everyone on the planet. Sometimes this will be actively, for example, with AI systems and tools, or passively, such as getting a medical scan. In fact, a lot of the time, we won't even consciously be using AI, which is why we all need to take time consciously to think about the ethical implications. Which brings us to our next way to use AI ethically. Number three, don't overestimate AI's capabilities too early.