It’s not the first time that universities have gotten tangled up with developments that would later come to haunt them, explains Olivia Guest, computational cognitive scientist at Radboud University and lead author of the paper. ‘From combustion engines to tobacco, universities have been used in the past to whitewash now-controversial products. For a long time, the tobacco industry pointed to research it subsidized at universities to claim its products were healthy.’
In their article, a position paper released as a pre-print this month, the researchers warn similar entanglements are happening with artificial intelligence technologies now. ‘A lot of academic research on AI currently is also funded by the AI industry, which creates the risk of distorting scientific knowledge, similar to how we’ve seen happen in the past’, adds Iris van Rooij, co-author and professor of computational cognitive science at Radboud University.