In the paper The Grey Hoodie Project: Big Tobacco, Big Tech, and the Threat on Academic Integrity, the authors investigate the very important issue of how the AI scientific agenda and policymaking around AI can be (and evidence imply they actually are) manipulated by Big Tech.
The abstract states:
“…Big Tech can actively distort the academic landscape to suit its needs. By comparing the well-studied actions of another industry (Big Tobacco) to the current actions of Big Tech we see similar strategies employed by both industries. These strategies enable either industry to sway and influence academic and public discourse. We examine the funding of academic research as a tool used by Big Tech to put forward a socially responsible public image, influence events hosted by and decisions made by funded universities, influence the research questions and plans of individual scientists, and discover receptive academics who can be leveraged…”
At the top of the post there is a figure showing how the different entities interact, and below the two main figures of the author’s study showing:
- Left: the percentage of Computer Science faculty of the sampled Ivy League Universities in US (UofT, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley) that have been funded by Big Tech (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Facebook, Nvidia),
- Right: similarly for faculty affiliation.
The big questions are sort of obvious:
– How can Big Tech companies, which are among the most natural subjects of societal and legal monitoring/regulation, be the “pioneers” and “primary investigators” of the underlying ethics or democratic principles that those regulations should serve?
– How can Academia play its role to demand fair and equitable development, when part of it becomes a vehicle of legitimation for the big private interests?
