[clickok]

Who, whom?

Less tersely: this article is one in a long procession of journalists trying to exert control over tech. The opening example (Speech2Face, which they aver is transphobic) is inflammatory and utterly unrepresentative of the usual topics of AI conferences. The other references are far better, but the choice is revealing-- it's not so much an abstract concern about an unaccountable few exerting control from the shadows, but alarm that someone else might be muscling in on their territory.

[croissants]

I'm with you that a lot of mass media writing about AI is silly, but I think this is article is not in that category. For example, it doesn't "aver [Speech2Face] is transphobic", that's from a statement by Alex Hanna, and that statement is immediately followed by comments from other people questioning the statement, and the piece in general is pretty even-keeled about giving space to criticisms and responses.

I think the article paints a good picture of the machine learning research community figuring out how to grapple with the growing number of people who want to probe its ethics, without portraying anybody as a villain.