AI Now Institute

Rather than add nurses, many hospitals are paring back, sometimes training apps where they can hire nurses as gig workers.

Such apps often allow hospitals to avoid paying for benefits for these workers, says Katie Wells, a senior fellow at the AI Now Institute who studies tech in health care.

Having gig workers in hospitals puts additional pressure on nurses because they have to train the new staff even though those workers may be there for only a day, Wiles says.

Many nurses say they'd much prefer full-time colleagues who have to be trained only once.

I think it can do a lot of good in the world, but, um, left unmonitored, I think it could be, uh, a catastrophe.

Will such anxiety feed into the upcoming midterm elections when the two main parties in Washington battle for control of the House of Representatives and the Senate? Amber Cakk is co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, a research center in the US on the line to New York.

I asked her for her sense of how the American public felt about AI right now.

Yeah.

Rather than add nurses, many hospitals are paring back, sometimes turning to apps where they can hire nurses as gig workers.

Such apps often allow hospitals to avoid paying for benefits for these workers, says Katie Wells, a senior fellow at the AI Now Institute who studies tech in health care.

Having gig workers in hospitals puts additional pressure on nurses because they have to train the new staff, even though those workers may be there for only a day, Wells says.

Many nurses say they'd much prefer full-time colleagues who have to be trained only once.

Frontier AI companies can help DoD gain a better understanding of the risks that might be associated with subsequent near-term frontier AI models or features to avoid strategic surprise and to mitigate the associated risks.

Heidi Clough, chief scientist at the AI Now Institute and a former safety engineer at OpenAI, told The Intercept, this is a dubious claim with dangerous implications.

Pointing to recent disclosures by OpenAI and Anthropic, that semi-autonomous large language models broke into computer networks owned by other companies during testing.

Clough questioned their fitness to help build guardrails in the first place.

I'm Amba Kak.

I'm the co-executive director of the AI Now Institute.

And Jack.

Jack Shanahan, uh, retired United States Air Force, but thanks to OFRA, I'm not gonna, like, say that anymore.

The headlines warned that the machines had gone rogue.

But Heidi Klaff of the AI Now Institute tells Hari Sreenivasan that is not the whole story.

In fact, it's the wrong story.

Take a listen.

I think the problem is actually to stop trying to build these harmful capabilities and to also control the companies from doing so.

Yeah, we're not.

Heidi Klaff, the Chief AI Scientist at the AI Now Institute, thanks so much for your time.

Thanks for having me.

Welcome to the Responsible Bytes podcast, everyone, the podcast where we talk about all things safe and responsible technology.

I'm your host, Dr. Zena Asad, and today I'm joined by Heidi Klaff, Chief AI Scientist at the AI Now Institute.

Welcome to the podcast, Heidi.

Thanks for having me.

Meredith Whitaker has spent most of her career inside the system and then outside it on purpose.

In 2017, she co-founded the AI Now Institute with Kate Crawford, one of the first research centers dedicated to studying what artificial intelligence does to society rather than just what it can do.

A year later, she was one of the organizers of the Google walkout, when roughly 20,000 employees and contractors walked off the job over how the company had handled sexual harassment claims.

She left Google in 2019, saying she wanted to keep doing accountability work somewhere that would actually let her keep doing it.

I joined Media Justice for a panel on tech money and politics, which is part of their broader series called Brobots vs. the People.

Along with AI Now Institute Senior Fellow Aya Ibrahim and Tech Oversight Project Deputy Executive Director Kyle Morse, I spoke about the crypto and AI industry's spending and strategies this midterm cycle.

That's titled Clocking the Brobots Playbook.

Finally, I rejoined the Trash Future gang not to talk about crypto for a change, but about Grokopedia, the supposed Wikipedia killer, which has not published any updates since April.

What, what are they trying to hide?

We'll speak to Amba Kak of the AI Institute and Antonio Casilli, the author of Waiting for Robots, and Julian Posada, author of Platform Extractivism.

All that and more coming up.

[outro music] Welcome to Democracy Now, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.