- A new study finds 82% of AI workers have stayed silent on safety concerns in internal meetings
- Nearly 1 in 4 workers said they believed their company’s claims about AI’s capabilities were overstated
- AI workers are increasingly looking for transparency and trust and business leaders should foster this culture to retain top talent
A new survey finds 82% of AI workers have stayed silent on safety concerns in internal meetings, partially due to fears around professional reputation.
Similarly, workers were found to be misaligned with leaders regarding AI’s capabilities. Nearly 1 in 4 say their company’s claims about AI are overstated.
Many AI workers said they’d leave their current company for one with a more honest public position. As more and more companies invest in AI, securing talent for AI companies appears to be as much about transparency as it is about a paycheck.
Workers Building AI Aren’t Speaking Up About Safety Concerns
Experts and cyber leaders alike have been speaking louder and louder about AI’s safety risks. However, it seems those working directly on the technology share the same sentiment.
In a new study from Movchan Agency, 82% of AI workers said they’d stayed quiet in an internal meeting about a safety, capability, or accuracy concerns, because it felt professionally risky. More than half (54%) say it has happened more than once.
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When asked why they had stayed silent, 42% said fear of being blacklisted in the industry, and 40% said fear of losing equity or vesting. The real leverage, as AI becomes more desirable within businesses, seems to be financial and reputational.
Despite this culture of silence, safety remains a top concern. 72% of those surveyed say they’d personally support a memorandum to pause AI capability advances, not unlike some of today’s top AI leaders.
“Most of the debate about trust in AI focuses on the public,” Neal Lathia, CTO and co-founder at Gradient Labs, told Tech.co in a recent interview. “The survey rightfully asks the people closest to the technology, which leads to an unsurprisingly uncomfortable answer.”
Leaders Are Overclaiming AI’s Capabilities
Not only are workers concerned for safety, the survey suggests a believability gap between leaders and workers linked to AI’s capabilities.
Of the surveyed workers building AI today, 23% believe their own company’s claims about the technology’s capabilities are overstated. Almost 2% say capabilities are substantially overstated.
Worker skepticism is rising, but it’s mostly doing so in private. 81% of workers have had conversations with colleagues about company concerns that they have not raised directly with leadership.
AI hasn’t exactly swept the world silently. It has inspired tales of mass job losses, global cyber attacks, and the end of human civilization. With a technology that claims so many headlines, the capability expectations are as high as the level of investment.
So, it’s understandable that speaking out would carry risk. However, companies can’t survive on hype alone. Workers need to be able to trust leaders and what they’re building.
“Leadership is the core to inspiring their organization’s trust in investments in AI and they can do so by being clear about what the product does today and keeping that separate from the product roadmap,” Lathia told us. “Most of the overclaiming that I encounter stems from blurring those two ends.”
Company Direction and Dishonesty Among Workers’ Reasons for Leaving
A lack of belief in a company’s mission is enough for workers to consider leaving, the data finds. 77% of respondents say a colleague has privately told them they’re considering leaving over the company’s direction or honesty.
Similarly, 87% of AI workers would leave their current job for a company with a more honest public position, suggesting transparency and trust are key for AI workers.
“It is a crowded market where every company is looking in the same pool of talented AI professionals,” Lathia said, “but being honest about what your product can do may be one of the best hiring advantages in your arsenal.”
Ultimately, businesses should focus on being honest with employees about what it is they’re building, and foster a culture of communication that treats raising concerns as a necessary part of the process.
