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> The people in AI ethics who spent years thinking their job was marketing or publishing thinkpiece papers may be having to adapt quickly or get out of the fiel

> The people in AI ethics who spent years thinking their job was marketing or publishing thinkpiece papers may be having to adapt quickly or get out of the field. Funny thing, right around the beginning of the big AI takeoff, all the AI ethics people who visibly thought their job was something other than marketing got driven out of the big firms, and often the industry entirely, because they were in the way. So, if too many think their job is marketing a few years later, well, there is a reason for that.

madrox 2mo ago
I think it interesting that Bakalar was at Meta for six years before joining OpenAI. A lot changed across the industry in those six years, and in the meantime I wouldn't be surprised if all Bakalar learned was how to play Meta politics.
- ghaff 2mo ago
  My sense is that many companies spun up various roles in part to be seen as doing something about various things. With the pullback in tech, even if the people in those roles weren't actively pushed out, the smarter ones probably saw which way the wind was blowing.
  - ifwinterco 2mo ago
    If you’re OpenAI you have to have an ethics department even if you don’t care at all, because otherwise it looks bad (“they don’t even have a head of ethics!”). So it’s entirely possible you end up in a situation where you have a highly paid, fairly prominent head of ethics whose actual job is mostly just saying they’re the head of ethics, with little actual power or influence. Ambitious people won’t tolerate that for long and they’ll move on
    - ghaff 2mo ago
      Totally agree. I could name (but won't) a couple other areas where the same sort of thing has tended to happen. It ends up cheaper and more PR-friendly to hire someone into a senior position that handles such-and-such than to have to answer questions about why you don't have a senior person handling such-and-such. At some point, the heat around the issue cools down and you can go back to business as usual.
Terr_ 2mo ago
Right, there may be multiple waves of people here, and the "thinking their job was marketing" ones aren't necessarily the first.

madrox 2mo ago

I think it interesting that Bakalar was at Meta for six years before joining OpenAI. A lot changed across the industry in those six years, and in the meantime I wouldn't be surprised if all Bakalar learned was how to play Meta politics.

ghaff 2mo ago
My sense is that many companies spun up various roles in part to be seen as doing something about various things. With the pullback in tech, even if the people in those roles weren't actively pushed out, the smarter ones probably saw which way the wind was blowing.
- ifwinterco 2mo ago
  If you’re OpenAI you have to have an ethics department even if you don’t care at all, because otherwise it looks bad (“they don’t even have a head of ethics!”). So it’s entirely possible you end up in a situation where you have a highly paid, fairly prominent head of ethics whose actual job is mostly just saying they’re the head of ethics, with little actual power or influence. Ambitious people won’t tolerate that for long and they’ll move on
  - ghaff 2mo ago
    Totally agree. I could name (but won't) a couple other areas where the same sort of thing has tended to happen. It ends up cheaper and more PR-friendly to hire someone into a senior position that handles such-and-such than to have to answer questions about why you don't have a senior person handling such-and-such. At some point, the heat around the issue cools down and you can go back to business as usual.

Terr_ 2mo ago

Right, there may be multiple waves of people here, and the "thinking their job was marketing" ones aren't necessarily the first.