When Santiago Canyon College President Jeannie Kim and professor and Distance Education coordinator Scotty James heard investigative reporter Karen Hao speak at the California Community Colleges Futures Summit in Santa Clara last September, the educators knew instantly they wanted to invite Kao to speak at SCC.
In her recently published book, “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI,” Hao chronicles the shift of OpenAI from a nonprofit organization to a tech giant and reveals the enormous societal and environmental costs of developing artificial intelligence.
Hao, a journalist who has won awards for her writing and podcasts, accepted Kim’s invitation, and on March 4, shared the findings of her book to 70 in-person attendees in the auditorium in the Humanities Building on campus, with another 205 watching on Zoom and 70 tuning in on YouTube.
“It was super important (to have her speak at SCC),” said James, who moderated Hao’s talk and panel discussion that followed. “I’m a big AI advocate and I think that it’s very beneficial technology. … After reading her book, the impact that it’s having, both the environmental impact and sociological impacts, are really concerning to me. If you’re going to use AI, you have the obligation also to help to try and mitigate those negative impacts of AI.”
Hao opened her talk by taking the audience, not to Silicon Valley, but to Nairobi, Kenya, where workers who were employed by an AI outsourcing firm were tasked with labeling some of the most disturbing material, including violent and sexual content involving abuse and children.
“None of this is magic,” Hao said. “It’s actually teams of workers … who spend hours a day tracing out the contours of all of the objects on the street and labeling them accordingly.”
This work was central to the success of ChatGPT, Hao said, but the pay was next to nothing — bordering on slave labor — between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour.
The work took an extreme emotional toll on the workers.
Hao said the exploitation of workers is the “expected consequence of the way that Silicon Valley takes a scale-at-all-costs approach to developing AI.”
keynote speaker Karen Hao during a Q&A session.
(Photo courtesy of RSCCD)
Such exploitive practices are the central argument of Hao’s book: Companies such as OpenAI function like modern empires, wielding economic and political power to the detriment of labor, education, geopolitics and environment.
“First, they lay claim to resources that are not their own, the data of private individuals, the intellectual property of artists, writers and creators,” Hao said. “Second, they exploit an extraordinary amount of labor. Third, they monopolize knowledge production.”
The most prominent AI systems today are not the most socially beneficial ones, Hao said.
Large-scale generative AI systems such as ChatGPT represent “the worst trade-offs in the portfolio of existing AI technologies,“ she said.
As AI firms build their empires at extraordinary cost on large swaths of society, Hao offers some potential solutions.
Hao said that while society can benefit from AI, the benefits cannot come “at the cost to our democracy.”
The solution is not to abandon AI but to change the political and economic structure from which AI is developed, the author said.
And rather than relying on large-scale exploitive AI firms, Hao suggests developing smaller, more efficient, task‑specific systems, which she calls “bicycles of AI.”
Hao also said individuals and communities should take a collective role in shaping AI’s future and that AI systems should be developed differently from the beginning.
Following Hao’s talk, James moderated a panel discussion with Hao and SCC students.
SCC student Maya Everakes, a computer science major, was among the panel participants.
Everakes came across Hao’s book while researching a class assignment on the impacts of social media on society.
“I was just so excited,” Everakes said. “And I totally obsessed over it. There was a time when I described Karen Hao as my favorite modern author before I even knew that she was going to come to this school. I’m so excited about this event. I just really loved it.”