Microsoft fires ethics and society team with AI division

Microsoft has laid off the entire "ethics and society" team within the AI organization as part of recent layoffs that affected 10,000 workers worldwide. According to Platformer, the move leaves Microsoft without a dedicated team to ensure that its AI principles closely tied to product design are followed. The latest round of layoffs also comes when the tech giant is aggressively expanding in-house generative AI, Bing AI.

The report states that Microsoft maintains an "active Office of Responsible AI, whose task is to create rules and principles to govern the company's AI initiatives." In addition, the company reportedly said it was committed to developing AI-powered products by "investing in people, processes, and partnerships." The report does not clarify whether employees from the ethics team are laid off but claims that the department increased "the number of people across our product teams and within the Office of Responsible AI."

Some former workers shared that the ethics and society team played an important role in ensuring that the tech giant's products reflect the company's principles. The team has also reportedly designed an RPG called Judgment Day to help designers and team members learn the "potential harm" products can cause. More recently, the team was working to identify risks posed by Microsoft's use of OpenAI's GPT-3 technology in its products, Microsoft Edge, Skype, and Bing.

Microsoft announced it would lay off 10,000 employees, with many in the US and India affected. Many have been fired from the company after several years of experience.

While Microsoft is aggressively expanding its Bing AI across all products, and the company, along with OpenAI, the creator of the ChatGPT chatbot, will introduce GPT-4 this week. GPT-4 will be the successor to the GPT-3 language module that powers ChatGPT. The new generation language module can even create videos with simple text inputs in English. In addition, the company recently added patented Prometheus-based Bing AI to search on the Windows 11 taskbar so more users can use its AI-powered tools.

The platform notes that Microsoft employees warned senior members last year about the damage AI tools like Dall-E could do to artists' livelihoods. A parallel concern was raised for Bing AI. However, unlike ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing Chat provides quotes to help customers find the source of information and not steal traffic from other websites.