Tim Berners-Lee Wants to Know: 'Who Does AI Work For?'

Amid all the talk of generative AI tools, agents and autonomous robots at South by Southwest, the inventor of the World Wide Web raised a simple point that developers will have to grapple with if the vision of AI everywhere is to come to life.

"The question is, who does it work for?" Tim Berners-Lee said Tuesday during a panel otherwise focused on robotics at the Austin, Texas, conference.

Trust in AI systems such as chatbots has been a focal point of discussions at SXSW this year. That includes conversations around the use of synthetic data and ways to regulate the AI industry. 

Berners-Lee's question drove to the heart of the issue: A company can make its AI models reliable, accurate and unbiased. But because they were created by large corporations, there will always be the question of whether they have the manufacturer's or the user's interest at heart. 

He made a comparison with doctors and lawyers. Your doctor may be employed by a university, health care system or practice, but they have a duty to work in your best interest. Your lawyer also has a duty to do what's in your best interest. But an AI assistant that's helping you plan a vacation or order products? It might be trained to nudge you toward improving the bottom line of its manufacturer.

"I want AIs to work for me to make the choices that I want to make," Berners-Lee said. "I don't want an AI that's trying to sell me something."

If you ask an AI assistant to get you the best deal on something, does it get the best deal for you or the best deal for it? Sitting on a panel of robotics experts, Berners-Lee challenged them to consider potential conflicts of interest.

"Always ask an AI, 'who do you work for?'" he said. "Whose better interests are you pursuing in your interests and your decisions?"

Lessons from the early web

Berners-Lee compared the current environment around artificial intelligence with the dawn of the World Wide Web in the early '90s. Back then, companies like Microsoft and Netscape came together with researchers and activists to form the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, to craft the infrastructure of the open internet.

"All these companies were building the Web together, and we made it together," he said.

That collaboration isn't happening in generative AI today, Berners-Lee said. He sees companies competing and trying to race each other to "superintelligence," but no comparable organization to the W3C setting standards. He suggested AI developers create a similar group or something like CERN, the intergovernmental nuclear research laboratory in Europe.

"We have it for nuclear physics," Berners-Lee said. "We don't have it for AI."