AI Ethics Pioneer Calls Artificial General Intelligence 'Just Vibes and Snake Oil'

Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face and founder of Google's responsible AI team, has dismissed artificial general intelligence as "just vibes and snake oil." Mitchell, who was ousted from Google in 2021, has co-written a paper arguing that AGI should not serve as a guiding principle for the AI industry. Mitchell contends that both "intelligence" and "general" lack clear definitions in AI contexts, creating what she calls an "illusion of consensus" that allows technologists to pursue any development path under the guise of progress toward AGI. "But as for now, it's just like vibes, vibes and snake oil, which can get you so far. The placebo effect works relatively well," she told FT in an interview. She warns that current AI advancement is creating a "massive rift" between those profiting from the technology and workers losing income as their creative output gets incorporated into AI training data.

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