Table 2.

Social concerns about AI technologies

Social concerns about AIDescriptions (Weidinger et al., 2022)Examples of coding excerpts from PRWeek
Discrimination, hate speech and exclusionLanguage models (LMs) can reflect harmful language from their training data, which may perpetuate social stereotypes or unjust treatment of marginalized groups, provoking hate, violence, offence“A search for 'gay couple’ on Midjourney returned hundreds of square-jawed, white, male pairs”
Information hazardsLM predictions using true but private data can cause privacy violations by leaking sensitive information, potentially cause emotional distress and infringing on a person’s rights“While some mistakes generate funny images, in others, the results can be damaging for individuals, sections of society and brands”
Misinformation harmsLMs that unintentionally produce false, misleading, or poor-quality information can cause harm by misinforming, deceiving, or resulting in material damage to a person“The only issue was that the cancer survivor was made up by AI - her emails, her quotes, and even her image”
Malicious usesThis risk is associated with humans deliberately using the LMs to cause harm, such as through scams, fraud and targeted disinformation campaigns“… measurement firm onclusive had fallen victim to a malicious and targeted cyber-attack …”
Human-computer interaction harmsLM-based conversational agents, such as advanced care robots, can make human-computer interactions more akin to human-human interactions, potentially exploiting and violating users’ privacy and reinforcing discriminatory stereotypes“Generative AI will also invariably predict the most likely response to questions, which risks losing the individual viewpoints and nuances captured through speaking with real people”
Environmental and socioeconomic harmsTraining and using language models require substantial energy and when combined with the uneven impacts of automation – such as job losses – can cause environmental and socioeconomic harms“The PR industry is antsy about AI … from nervousness about automation replacing human workers”
Source(s): Table created by authors and adapted from Weidinger et al. (2022) 

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