Last week, OpenAI safety leader David Robinson resigned from the company, becoming the latest to join what is, in his words, a “parade of former colleagues” who have left roles at AI companies amid concerns about the tech or its use. In a subsequent essay for The Atlantic, he said the “trial and error” approach favored by AI companies must end.

Robinson is far from alone. Here’s a list of other AI researchers and employees who’ve made public warnings about their former employers.

In November 2023, Ed Newton-Rex left his role leading the audio team at Stability AI, the maker of text-to-image tool Stable Diffusion, over concerns about the way copyrighted material was being used to train the tech.

“My opinion here doesn’t align with the generative AI industry’s current way of doing things,” Newton-Rex told Fast Company following his resignation, adding that he thought the industry’s prevailing outlook, paired with rapidly advancing tech, would be “very, very bad for creators.” 

Since then, he’s founded Fairly Trained, a nonprofit that issues certifications for AI companies whose data use meets certain requirements.

” In it, they asserted that the technology poses risks ranging from “the further entrenchment of existing inequalities, to manipulation and misinformation, to the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction,” and expressed concerns about a lack of oversight.

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