AI Whistleblowers Say Researchers Are Checking AI Less Frequently

The Information's AI Agenda newsletter brings us a headline: 'AI Whistleblowers Say Researchers Are Checking AI Less Frequently.' That, as excerpted, is the entire scoop — a comparative adverb and a verb travelling in the wrong direction. No laboratories are named, and neither are the whistleblowers, which takes some of the fun out of a whistle being blown. There are no numbers, no dates, no internal audit left helpfully on the office printer for a passing journalist to find. The Information has established, exclusively, that a thing is happening slightly less often than it used to.

Marvellous: notice the verb, 'checking,' which is what the industry calls evaluation when it wants the business to sound like a man with a clipboard doing the rounds. Notice the comparative too: not stopped, not overruled, not told by a vice-president that the release date is immovable. Less frequently — like a gym membership, like flossing, like the annual audit nobody has booked. Somewhere a compliance deck is being updated to say that safety remains one of our core values, with 'remains' doing the heavy lifting. This is the language labs use when they want a sentence that survives a deposition and means nothing at all.

We have been on this beat already: Scientific American asked what makes a good AI safety test, and independent researcher Jack Hopkins concluded that you would first need to know what you were testing for. Now comes the sequel — whatever those tests were, they are apparently being sat a little less often, by somebody, somewhere. The whistleblowers are presumably the ones who noticed, which is what the word means now: not someone who uncovered a crime, but someone who mentioned a spreadsheet to a journalist. The rest of the script writes itself, because 'less frequently' is not an offence in any jurisdiction on earth. The labs will issue a paragraph about robust processes, the whistleblowers will sign something with a confidentiality clause, and the models will keep shipping at three in the morning, unexamined, on schedule.