Study finds that few major AI research papers consider negative impacts

In recent decades, AI has become a pervasive technology, affecting companies across industries and throughout the world. These innovations arise from research, and the research objectives in the AI field are influenced by many factors. Together, these factors shape patterns in what the research accomplishes, as well as who benefits from it -- and who doesn't. In an effort to document the factors influencing AI research, researchers at Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Washington, and University College Dublin & Lero surveyed 100 highly cited studies submitted to two prominent AI conferences, NeurIPS and ICML. They claim that in the papers they analyzed, which were published in 2008, 2009, 2018, and 2019, the dominant values were operationalized in ways that centralize power, disproportionally benefiting corporations while neglecting society's least advantaged.