As a customer relationship management service, Salesforce doesn't get as much press scrutiny on the misuse of AI as some of the consumer tech giants — but part Baxter's job is PR, attending conferences and telling people what Salesforce's approach to AI is.
When it comes to the other big companies, Baxter sees a wide range of public approaches to AI. Some Silicon Valley giants are necessarily vocal, she says, while others are notably absent from the slew of AI ethics-focused events she attends.A member of Google's disastrous AI council says the company needs to be treated like a"world power"
"I don't see anyone from Amazon participating in these [AI ethics] conferences... So it's hard to know what are the conversations that are happening internally because they're not talking about it. All we can do is just make guesses about their motivations, their goals, their mindsets." Amazon is not entirely silent on the issue of the ethical use of its AI. Amazon Web Services' general manager of artificial intelligence, Matt Wood, and VP of Global Public Policy Michael Punke, engaged in a public back-and-forth with researchers followinghighlighting racial and gender bias in its systems. Wood called the paper's conclusions"misleading," and subsequently, while refusing to sell the technology for use on police body-mounted cameras.
Baxter says that during her tenure at Google, conversations were already starting to get underway about the ethics of certain features like YouTube's autoplay function, which has been criticised among other things for