Tony Blair Institute criticised for using AI to predict job losses

The Tony Blair Institute (TBI) faced criticism for using artificial intelligence to predict job losses, drawing criticism from journalists, economists and academics. In a paper pushing for the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) across the UK public sector, t he TBI argued that AI could save around 20 percent of workforce time, amounting to GBP 10 billion annually by 2028 . However, t he institute's use of AI technology to forecast employment trends was castigated by 404 Media and other publications as unsound given AI's known ability to be inaccurate, not least when dealing with complex socioeconomic factors, and inappropriate given the optics of an institute creating a research paper into the benefits of AI which heavily uses AI to tell us whether AI is going to be a good thing. Critics have noted that oversimplified AI models can lead to inaccurate and potentially harmful predictions. A TBI spokesperson later said "it trained a version of ChatGPT by prompting it with a rubric of rules to help classify tasks that could (and could not) be done by AI " and that it built its approach "on recent academic and empirical studies ... to ensure the model was performing robustly and producing credible results that were anchored in real-world data ." System 🤖 GPT-4 Operator: Tony Blair Institute Developer: OpenAI; Tony Blair Institute Country: UK Sector: Politics Purpose: Generate text Technology: Large language model Issue: Accuracy/reliability; Tr ansparency

Date it happened

2024-07-01

Organisation involved

Tony Blair Institute

Product, system or model

GPT-4

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