Geoscience AI in crisis?

My letter in the ‘Geoscientist’ raises serious concerns about Artificial Intelligence from the Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE) project, around lack of transparency, state censorship, and potential copyright infringement.

DDE is an international geoscience Big Data and AI project endorsed by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) and led by China. The DDE accords were signed by various international geological organisations, with a governing body of geologists drawn from those institutions.

Over the past year or so DDE developed a geoscience chatbot “GeoGPT” that provides AI-generated answers similar to ChatGPT. While not yet publicly available, GeoGPT is billed as one of DDE’s core public services and has been promoted, demonstrated and discussed at numerous international conferences.
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An underlying foundation Large Language Model (LLM) for GeoGPT is Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen “Qwen”. Due to Chinese censorship laws, “Qwen” is state censored. In DDE’s reply to my letter today, they do not appear to categorically rule out the possibility of state censorship within the IUGS endorsed GeoGPT.

Ethically, I argue strongly that any tool developed in the name of and for the international geological community should never be based on AI that could be subject to any government censorship.

My intention has been to ensure the geoscience community is informed with evidence of these concerns publicly. Concerns on digital geoscience that I felt were not being listened to or addressed in private. We all wish to realise the transformative benefits of geoscience AI to society, however if it is not done ethically, we will lose trust from the very people we are trying to help.

The link to the full letter and reply from DDE can be found here: https://geoscientist.online/sections/viewpoint/geoscience-ai-in-crisis/

Note: DDE received my letter via the ‘Geoscientist’ at the end of April 2024 for right of reply. They have only just sent an approved reply (June 17th 2024) so its possible some changes have been made to GeoGPT in direct response to the letter, which would be a positive step. Also, most likely as a result of the letter which IUGS also saw prior to publication, on the 4th June 2024 the IUGS has arranged a meeting to take place on the 16th July 2024 to discuss these matters further with numerous geological, science and DDE leaders.