Entrenchment and exacerbation of existing inequalities

"The most serious access-related risks posed by advanced AI assistants concern the entrenchment and exacerbation of existing inequalities (World Inequality Database) or the creation of novel, previously unknown, inequities. While advanced AI assistants are novel technology in certain respects, there are reasons to believe that – without direct design interventions – they will continue to be affected by inequities evidenced in present-day AI systems (Bommasani et al., 2022a). Many of the access-related risks we foresee mirror those described in the case studies and types of differential access. In this section, we link them more tightly to elements of the definition of an advanced AI assistant to better understand and mitigate potential issues – and lay the path for assistants that support widespread and inclusive opportunity and access. We begin with the existing capabilities set out in the definition (see Chapter 2) before applying foresight to those that are more novel and emergent. Current capabilities: Artificial agents with natural language interfaces. Artificial agents with natural language interfaces are widespread (Browne, 2023) and increasingly integrated into the social fabric and existing information infrastructure, including search engines (Warren, 2023), business messaging apps (Slack, 2023), research tools (ATLAS.ti, 2023) and accessibility apps for blind and low-vision people (Be My Eyes, 2023). There is already evidence of a range of sociotechnical harms that can arise from the use of artificial agents with natural language interfaces when some communities have inferior access to them (Weidinger et al., 2021). As previously described, these harms include inferior quality of access (in situation type 2) across user groups, which may map onto wider societal dynamics involving race (Harrington et al., 2022), disability (Gadiraju et al., 2023) and culture (Jenka, 2023). As developers make it easier to integrate these technologies into other tools, services and decision-making systems (e.g. Marr, 2023; Brockman et al., 2023; Pinsky, 2023), their uptake could make existing performance inequities more pronounced or introduce them to new and wider publics."