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Analysis + update Big tech s approach to avoiding AI regulation looks a lot like Big Tobacco s campaign to shape smoking rules, according to academics who say machine-learning ethics standards need to be developed outside of the influence of corporate sponsors.
In a paper included in the Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES ’21) next month, Mohamed Abdalla, a doctoral student in computer science at the University of Toronto, and Moustafa Abdalla, a doctoral student on deferral from Harvard Medical School, explore how Big Tech has adopted strategies similar to those used by Big Tobacco.
The analogy is not perfect, the two brothers acknowledge, but is intended to provide a historical touchstone and to leverage the negative gut reaction to Big Tobacco’s funding of academia to enable a more critical examination of Big Tech. The comparison is also not an assertion that Big Tech is deliberately buying off researchers; rather, the rese