Current access risks

"At the same time, and despite this overall trend, AI systems are also not easily accessible to many communities. Such direct inaccessibility occurs for a variety of reasons, including: purposeful non-release (situation type 1; Wiggers and Stringer, 2023), prohibitive paywalls (situation type 2; Rogers, 2023; Shankland, 2023), hardware and compute requirements or bandwidth (situation types 1 and 2; OpenAI, 2023), or language barriers (e.g. they only function well in English (situation type 2; Snyder, 2023), with more serious errors occurring in other languages (situation type 3; Deck, 2023). Similarly, there is some evidence of ‘actively bad’ artificial agents gating access to resources and opportunities, affecting material well-being in ways that disproportionately penalise historically marginalised communities (Block, 2022; Bogen, 2019; Eubanks, 2017). Existing direct and indirect access disparities surrounding artificial agents with natural language interfaces could potentially continue – if novel capabilities are layered on top of this base without adequate mitigation (see Chapter 3)."