New archbishop of San Francisco sets out pastoral plan

On a side street outside the headquarters of the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology in the center of London on Monday, 20 or so protesters are getting their chants in order.

“What do we want? Safe AI! When do we want it?” The protesters hesitate. “Later?” someone offers.

The group of mostly young men huddle for a moment before breaking into a new chant. “What do we want? Pause AI! When do we want it? Now!”

These protesters are part of Pause AI, a group of activists petitioning for companies to pause development of large AI models which they fear could pose a risk to the future of humanity.

Other PauseAI protests are taking place across the globe: In San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Rome, Ottawa, and a handful of other cities.

Their aim is to grab the attention of voters and politicians ahead of the AI Seoul Summit—a follow-up to the AI Safety Summit held in the UK in November 2023. But the loosely organized group of protesters itself is still figuring out exactly the best way to communicate its message.

“The Summit didn’t actually lead to meaningful regulations,” says Joep Meindertsma, the founder of PauseAI. The attendees at the conference agreed to the “Bletchley Declaration,” but that agreement doesn’t mean much, Meindertsma says. “It’s only a small first step, and what we need are binding international treaties.”

The group’s main demand is for a pause on the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4—it’s calling for all countries to implement this measure, but specifically calls out the United States as the home of most leading AI labs. The group also wants all UN member states to sign a treaty that sets up an international AI safety agency with responsibility for granting new deployments of AI systems and training runs of large models. Their protests are taking place on the same day as OpenAI announced a new version of ChatGPT to make the chatbot act more like a human.

“We have banned technology internationally before,” says Meindertsma, pointing to the Montreal Protocol, a global agreement finalized in 1987 that saw the phaseout of CFCs and other chemicals known to deplete the ozone layer. “We’ve got treaties that ban blinding laser weapons. I’m pretty optimistic that there is a way in which we can pause.”

One protester at the London march, Oliver Chamberlain, says he’s not sure that companies committing to pause their AI research is likely, but he feels so concerned about the future that he was compelled to protest. Only substantial regulation on AI would make him feel more optimistic about the situation, he says.

There is also the question of how PauseAI should achieve its aims. On the group’s Discord, some members discussed the idea of staging sit-ins at the headquarters of AI developers. OpenAI, in particular, has become a focal point of AI protests. In February, Pause AI protests gathered in front of OpenAI’s San Francisco offices, after the company changed its usage policies to remove a ban on military and warfare applications for its products.