Large language models, and more generally foundation models, are powerful technologies that carry a potential risk of significant harm. Unfortunately, we, the AI community, currently lack community norms around their responsible development and deployment. Nonetheless, it is essential for members of the AI community to condemn clearly irresponsible practices.
Yannic Kilcher's deployment of GPT-4chan is a clear example of irresponsible practice. GPT-4chan is a language model that Kilcher trained on over three million 4chan threads from the Politically Incorrect /pol/ board, a community full of racist, sexist, xenophobic, and hateful speech that has been linked to white-supremacist violence such as the Buffalo shooting last month. He then used GPT-4chan to generate and deceptively post over 30,000 posts on 4chan mimicking the hateful comments it was trained on without identifying the model as a bot. Kilcher now claims that the release of “the most horrible model on the internet” was “a prank and light-hearted trolling.”
It is possible to imagine a reasonable case for training a language model on toxic speech, for example, to detect and understand toxicity on the internet, or for general analysis. However, Kilcher’s decision to deploy this bot does not meet any test of reasonableness. His actions deserve censure. He undermines the responsible practice of AI science.
If you agree with this statement, please fill out this form to sign it.
Contacts: Percy Liang (
pliang@cs.stanford.edu) and Rob Reich (
reich@stanford.edu)
Signatories (360) as of July 05, 2022:
Yoshua Bengio, Full Professor, Scientific director of Mila and IVADO, U. Montreal / Mila
Jonathan Berant, Associate Professor, Tel Aviv University
Rishi Bommasani, PhD student, Stanford University
Sam Bowman, Assistant Professor, NYU
Ryan Cotterell, Assistant Professor, ETH Zürich
Aaron Courville, Associate Professor, U. Montreal / Mila
Mona Diab, Research Scientist (Lead Responsible AI Research Scientist), Meta
Fernando Diaz, Research Scientist, Google/Mila
Thomas Dietterich, Professor (Emeritus), Oregon State University
Emily Dinan, Research Engineer, FAIR
Benjamin Van Durme, Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University
Oren Etzioni, CEO, Allen AI
Pascale Fung, Professor and Director of the Centre for AI Research (CAiRE), Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Iason Gabriel, Research Scientist, DeepMind
Christian Gagné, Full professor, Director of the IID, Université Laval
Aidan Gomez, CEO, Cohere
Tatsunori Hashimoto, Assistant Professor, Stanford University
Karim Jerbi, Full professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Machine Learning, Université de à Montréal / Mila
Foutse Khomh, Full Professor, Polytechnique Montreal
Simon Lacoste-Julien, Associate Professor, U. Montréal / Mila
Guillaume Lajoie, Assistant Professor, Université de Montréal & Mila
Sébastien Lemieux, Associate Professor, IRIC, Université de Montréal
Percy Liang, Associate Professor, Stanford University
Bang Liu, Assistant Professor, University of Montreal / Mila
Christopher Manning, Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, Stanford University
Ioannis Mitliagkas, Associate Professor, University of Montreal, Mila
Joelle Pineau, Managing Director, Meta AI, FAIR
Christopher Potts, Professor, Stanford University
Colin Raffel, Assistant Professor, UNC Chapel Hill
Siva Reddy, Assistant Professor, Mila, McGill University
Rob Reich, Professor, Stanford University
Blake Richards, Assistant Professor, Mila/McGill University
Verena Rieser, Professor, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh/ ALANA AI
Nicolas Le Roux, Researcher, Microsoft Research / Mila
Alexander Rush, Associate Professor, Cornell
Hinrich Schuetze, Professor, LMU Munich
Xujie Si, Assistant Professor, Mila, McGill University
Emma Strubell, Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Zeerak Talat, Postdoctoral Fellow, Simon Fraser University
Laura Weidinger, Research Scientist, DeepMind
Adina Williams, Research Scientist, FAIR
Divyansh Kaushik, PhD Candidate, Carnegie Mellon University
Ehsan Kamalloo, PhD candidate, University of Alberta
Niladri Chatterji, Postdoctoral Researcher, Stanford University
Andrey Kurenkov, Phd candidate, Stanford University
Greg Durrett, Assistant Professor, UT Austin
Chhavi Yadav, PhD student, UCSD
John Henning, Research Engineer, IBM Research
Maksym Andriushchenko, PhD student, EPFL
Hunar Batra, MSc Student, University of Oxford
Emma Pierson, Assistant professor of computer science, Cornell Tech
Tanmayee Narendra, PhD candidate, University of Tübingen
Juan M. Banda, Assistant Professor, Georgia State University
Srijan Kumar, Assistant Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
Atoosa Kasirzadeh, Assistant Professor, University of Edinburgh
Luca Ambrogioni, Dr., Radboud University
Esin Durmus, Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford University
Ozan Caglayan, Dr., Imperial College London
Charles Frye, Instructor, Full Stack Deep Learning
Surya Ganguli, Associate Professor, Stanford University
Yoav Artzi, Associate Professor, Cornell University
Wes Gurnee, PhD Student, MIT
Savvas Zannettou, Assistant Professor, Delft University of Technology
Samy Bengio, Senior Director of Machine Learning Research, Apple
Janarthanan Rajendran, Postdoctoral Fellow, Mila; University of Montreal
Ramon Ruiz-Dolz, PhD candidate, Valencian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (VRAIN)
Siddharth Garg, Associate Professor, NYU
Sam Skjonsberg, Principal Software Engineer, Allen AI
Gerard de Melo, Professor, HPI / University of Potsdam
Yash Kumar Lal, PhD student, Stony Brook University
Thomas Rogers, Lead Researcher, Tractable
Michael Langan, Senior Engineer, AI2
Xiang Lorraine Li, PhD student, UMass Amherst
Matthew Peters, Research Scientist, Allen Institute for AI
Daniel Watson, Research Engineer, Google Brain
Jerome Massot, Machine Learning Engineer, Schlumberger STIC
Pablo Samuel Castro, Señor Swesearcher, Google
Melissa McCradden, Bioethicist, Director of AI integration, The Hospital for Sick Children
Vivek Srikumar, Associate Professor, University of Utah
Sam Stuesser, UI/UX Lead, Allen Institute for AI
Michael Ogezi, MSc Student, University of Alberta
Ghulam Rasool, Assistant Member, Moffitt Cancer Center
Kejian Shi, Student, NYU
Yannis Kalantidis, Research scientist, NAVER LABS Europe
Baobao Zhang, Assistant Professor, Syracuse University
David R. Mortensen, Systems Scientist, Carnegie Mellon University
Adel Ahmadyan, Software Engineer, Google
Luca Soldaini, Research Scientist, Allen Institute for AI
Cassandra Jacobs, Assistant Professor, University at Buffalo
Fabio Boniolo, Postdoctoral Fellow, Dana Farber Cancer Institute
Max Bartolo, PhD Candidate, University College London
Priyadarshini Panda, Assistant Professor, Yale University
Arnaud Nguemang Fadja, Head of Machine Learning, Paragon Semvox
Md Imbesat Hassan Rizvi, Research Associate, Indian Institute of Science
Guillaume Desjardins, Research Scientist, DeepMind
Joseph Viviano, Research Scientist, Deep Genomics
Charlie Blake, Researcher, Graphcore
Jasmijn Bastings, Research Scientist, Google Research
Noah Jones, Ph.D Candidate, MIT
Liam Dugan, PhD Student, University of Pennsylvania
Nicolas Papernot, Assistant Professor and Canada CIFAR AI Chair, University of Toronto and Vector Institute
Dirk Weißenborn, Technical Staff, Inceptive Inc
Vikas Raunak, Researcher, Microsoft
Rebecca L. Johnson, PhD researcher, University of Sydney, Google
Logan Engstrom, PhD Candidate, MIT EECS
Paramveer Dhillon, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
Benjamin Han, Principal Science Manager, Microsoft Azure AI
Jean Marie Tshimula, PhD Candidate, Université de Sherbrooke
Justin Dauwels, Associate Professor, TU Delft
Hasnat Aslam, PhD student, University of Nebraska Lincoln
Ben Hayes, PhD Candidate, Queen Mary University of London
Mackenzie Mathis, Assistant Professor, ELLIS Scholar, EPFL
Hamid Palangi, Researcher, Microsoft Research
Rakesh R Menon, PhD student, UNC Chapel Hill
Shreya Gupta, MS student, Symbolic Systems, Stanford
Danqi Chen, Assistant Professor, Princeton University
Sashank Santhanam, Researcher, UNC Charlotte
Jacob Eisenstein, Research Scientist, Google
Jekaterina Novikova, Head of ML Research, Winterlight Labs
James Atwood, Software Engineer, Google Responsible AI
Anselmo Cardoso de paiva, Full Professor, Federal university of Maranhao
Allen Roush, Principal Machine Learning Architect, Oracle Corporation
Carlie de Boer, TPM, You.com
Sam Cohen, Associate Professor, University of Oxford / Alan Turing Institute
R Devon Hjelm, Research Scientist, Apple MLR and Mila
Vikram Sundar, PhD Student, MIT
Christof Monz, Professor of Computer Science, University of Amsterdam
Reza Babanezhad, Research Scientist, Samsung
Ronald Salamanca, Systems Engineer, IBM
Dagmar Monett, Head of Computer Science Dept., Berlin School of Economics and Law
Aaron Snoswell, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, AI Accountability and Computational Law, Queensland University of Technology
Maryam Fazel, Research Engineering Manager, FAIR
Abhik Lahiri, Software Engineer, Nuro
Nuno Rodrigues, PhD student, LASIGE
Graham Boylan, Senior Engineer, Amazon Alexa Devices
Dipanjan (DJ) Sarkar, Lead Data Scientist & Google Developer Expert - ML, Schaffhausen Institute of Technology Academy, Zurich
Nikos Karampatziakis, Principal Researcher, Microsoft
Mouhidine SEIV, Founder, HrFlow.ai
Nils Koesters, Research Director, DATAFAKTS Ltd
Jason Mancuso, Research Engineer, Cape Privacy
Soroush Vosoughi, Assistant Professor, Dartmouth College
Richa Rastogi, PhD Student, Cornell University
Solomeo Paredes, Software Engineer, Google
François Major, Full Professor, Université de Montréal DIRO/IRIC
Faisal Ladhak, PhD Candidate, Columbia University
Rui Shu, PhD Candidate, Stanford University
Phillip Christoffersen, PhD student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Madison May, ML Architect, Indico Data Solutions
Raghav Malik, Research assistant, Purdue University
Vikash Sehwag, Graduate Student, Princeton University
Rosanne Liu, Executive Director / Research Scientist, ML Collective / Google Brain
Peter Ho, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Sunway University
Miles Brundage, Head of Policy Research, OpenAI
Delip Rao, Head of AI / Faculty, Polywork / UC Santa Cruz
Benjamin Heinzerling, Postdoctoral Researcher, RIKEN
Daniel Kokotajlo, Member of Policy Staff, OpenAI
Andreas Madsen, PhD Candidate, Mila
Suchin Gururangan, PhD candidate, University of Washington
Barun Patra, Applied Scientist, Microsoft
Alexandre Lacoste, Research Scientist, ServiceNow
Amy Bruckman, Regents’ Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
Eshaan Pathak, Machine Learning Engineer, You.com
Erin LeDell, Chief Machine Learning Scientist, H2O.ai
Divyam Madaan, PhD student, NYU
Hardy, Assistant Professor, Universitas Mikroskil
Liang Huang, Associate Professor, Oregon State University
Claire Gu, Machine Learning Scientist, Amira Learning
Greg Renard, Head of AI, —
Abhijit Suprem, PhD student, Georgia Institute of Technology
Nam Nguyen, Lane Postdoctoral Fellow, Carnegie Mellon University
William Garfinkel, Lecturer, Yale University
Howard Chen, PhD student, Princeton University
David Alvarez-Melis, Researcher, Microsoft Research & Harvard University
James Bradbury, Software Engineer, Google Research
Nícolas Roque dos Santos, PhD student, University of São Paulo
Antonis Papasavva, PhD Candidate, University College London
Thomas Wood, Chief Scientist, PhytoMech Industries
Arthur Brussee, Software Engineer, DeepMind
Florian Golemo, Postdoctoral Fellow, Mila / University of Montreal
Samuel Ainsworth, PhD Candidate, University of Washington
Shaojun Zhu, Senior Engineer, Motive Technologies
Fadoua Khmaissia, Research Assistant | Machine Learning Engineer Intern, University of Louisville | Apple
Keiran Paster, PhD Student, University of Toronto / Vector Institute
Khimya Khetarpal, PhD candidate, Mila, McGill University
Jack Rae, Member of Technical Staff, OpenAI
Clayton Mellina, Software Engineer, Rarebase PBC
Christopher Marshall, CTO, Dynium.AI
Ye Kyaw Thu, Affiliate Professor, NECTEC, Thailand and CADT, Cambodia
Mike Hawk, Research Scientist, Intel
Zhi Wen, Applied research scientist, Mila
Kaushik Moudgalya, Master's student, University of Montreal
Stephen Rhein, Graduate, University of Delaware
Josh Gardner, PhD Student, University of Washington
Andreas Geert Motzfeldt, Assistant Researcher, The Technical University of Denmark
Hrant Davtyan, CEO, Pinsight
Vasileios Lioutas, PhD Student, University of British Columbia
Ishtiaque Ahmed, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto
Trong-Thang Pham, AI Researcher, AIOZ Singapore
Yu Su, Assistant Professor, The Ohio State University
James Landay, Professor, Stanford University
Gustavo Penha, PhD candidate, TU Delft
Yuhuai Wu, Research Scientist, Google / Stanford
Jiahao Chen, CTO, Parity
Dotun Akintayo, GPU Software Dev Engineer, Intel Corporation
Bipasha Sen, MS Student, International Institute of Information Technology
Aditya Agarwal, MS Student, International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad
Hannes Hapke, ML Engineer + Google Developer Expert for ML, Digits Financial, Inc.
Rajiv Movva, PhD Student, Cornell
Juan Miguel Valverde, PhD student, University of Eastern Finland
Dushyant Rao, Research Scientist, DeepMind
Nate Kushman, Research Scientist, Deepmind
Aurelie Jean, CEO / CAIO, In Silico Veritas / DPEEX
Maximilian Ilse, Senior Researcher, Microsoft
Kranthi Kiran GV, Graduate student, NYU
Boxin Wang, PhD Candidate, UIUC
Jinqi Chen, undergrad student, Carnegie Mellon University
Courtney Radsch, Fellow, UCLA Institute for Technology, Law & Policy
Nora Kassner, PhD student, LMU Munich
Eduardo Sánchez González, NLP Engineer, Institute of the Estonian Language
Zviad Nozadze, ML Engineer, Free University of Tbilisi
Jiatong Han, Undergraduate, National University of Singapore
Cristiano De Nobili, Lead AI Scientist, Pi School
Börje Karlsson, Principal Research Eng. Lead, Microsoft Research Asia
Bertie Vidgen, CEO, Rewire
Biplav Srivastava, Professor, AI Institute, University of South Carolina
Roman Ring, Research Engineer, DeepMind
Ching Lam Choi, Student, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
André Marquand, Associate professor, Donders institute for brain, cognition and behavior
Matteo Grella, Head of Research & Artificial Intelligence, Crisis24 (a GardaWorld company)
Chun-Min Chang, Software Engineer, Ambarella Corp.
Aleksandar Petrov, DPhil student, University of Oxford
Sahil Singla, PhD student, University of Maryland
Arjun Chandra, Member of the Engineering Team, Graphcore
António Câmara, PhD student, Harvard
Raia Hadsell, Senior Director of Research, DeepMind
Arushi Jain, Applied Scientist, Microsoft
Maria Liakata, Professor, Queen Mary University of London
Toby Walsh, Professor of AI, UNSW Sydney
Lenore Blum, Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science, Emerita and Distinguished Professor in Residence, CMU and UC Berkeley
Kung-Hsiang Huang, PhD Student, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
Tobin South, PhD Student, MIT
Vin Bhaskara, Research Engineer, Samsung AI Centre Toronto / University of Toronto
Marta Poblet, Professor, RMIT University
Kyle Morgenstein, PhD student, University of Texas at Austin
Ruhul Amin, Assistant Professor, Fordham University
Bhanu Pratap Singh, PhD Candidate, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Ricardo Joseh Lima, Professor, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
Hieu Pham, Research Scientist, Google Brain
Sephora Madjiheurem, Research Scientist, DeepMind
Jackson Waschura, Software Engineer, Zoox, Inc.
Francesco Quinzan, Postdoctoral researcher, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Tegan Maharaj, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto
Siddharth Karamcheti, PhD Student, Stanford University
Dan Simonson, Principal Computational Linguist, BlackBoiler
Max Ehrlich, Research Scientist, NVIDIA/University of Maryland
Arvind Narayanan, Professor, Princeton University
Sergia Volodin, MSc graduate, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)
Chenhao Tan, Assistant Professor, University of Chicago
Hongyang Zhang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Northeastern University
Padideh Nouri, Graduate researcher, U. Montreal, Mila
Sonia Roberts, Postdoctoral Researcher, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University
Kirk Rodgers, Senior Research manager, Electronic Arts
Odysseas Pentakalos, CTO, SYSNET International, Inc.
Dr. Nick Eckenstein, Senior Robotics Software Engineer, Berkshire Grey
Khalid El-Arini, Research Scientist, Meta AI
Christoph Lampert, Professor, Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)
Suzanne Tamang, Incoming Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, Stanford University
Vaibhav Adlakha, PhD student, McGill University/ Mila
Leon Derczynski, Associate Professor, ITU Copenhagen
Sabrina J. Mielke, PhD candidate, Johns Hopkins University
Dongyeop Kang, Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota
Roma Patel, PhD Student, Brown University
Priya Donti, PhD Candidate, Carnegie Mellon University
João Felipe Santos, Research Scientist, NVIDIA
Sebastian Gehrmann, Senior Research Scientist, Google Research
Anthony Platanios, Principal Researcher, Microsoft
Charles Averill, Student Researcher, University of Texas at Dallas
Stephen Wright, Computer Science Teacher, Oakland Unified School District
Samyak Gupta, PhD Student, Princeton University
Djordje Padejski, Associate Director JSK Fellowships; PhD student, Stanford University; Arizona State University
Rebecca Qian, Research Engineer, Facebook AI Research
Karen Zhou, PhD Student, University of Chicago
Timothy J. Hazen, Senior Staff Machine Learning Researcher, Twitter
Jaydeep Borkar, PhD Student, Northeastern University
Göran Sandström, Machine Learning Engineer, BookBeat AB
MH Tessler, Research Scientist, DeepMind
Pang Wei Koh, PhD student, Stanford University
Chenyan Xiong, Principle Researcher, Microsoft Research
Artur Garcez, Professor, City, University of London
Jean-Peic Chou, Master's student, Stanford University
Gabriele Sarti, PhD Student, University of Groningen
Pierre Fernandez, Research Assistant, PhD student, Meta AI, FAIR
Tina Eliassi-Rad, Professor, Northeastern University
Rachel Rudinger, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland
Khyati Mahajan, PhD Candidate, UNC Charlotte
Steffen Eckhard, Professor of Public Administration, Zeppelin University
Anna Korhonen, Professor, University of Cambridge
Kaustubh Sakhalkar, Researcher, Saarland University
Wayne Polatkan, CEO, Tuloy
Yannik Kumar, Data Scientist, CVS Health
Prof. dr Ulises Cortés, Professor, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Qiao Gu, PhD Student, University of Toronto
Stuart Watt, CTO, Turalt
Karel D'Oosterlinck, PhD Student, Ghent University
Robert Dale, Consultant, Language Technology Group
Toryn Klassen, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Toronto / Vector Institute / Schwartz Reisman Institute
Vanya BK, NLP Research Engineer, Bytedance
Amanda Stent, Director, Davis Institute for AI, Colby College
Joonsuk Park, Assistant Professor, University of Richmond
James Thoren, Assistant Professor, KAIST
Gabriel Mukobi, Undergraduate Student, Stanford University
Karthik Ravi, Machine Learning Engineer, Paypal
Craig Glastonbury, Research Group Leader, Human Technopole
Chaitanya K. Joshi, PhD Student, University of Cambridge
Shanya Sharma, Software Engineer, Walmart Labs
Sumanth Ratna, Undergraduate Student, Yale University
Sophia Batchelor, PPIE Research / Community Manager, The Alan Turing Institute
Rohan Kokkula, Solutions Architect, Botpress
Jarrid Rector-Brooks, PhD Student, Mila, Universite de Montreal
Nikola Nikolov, ML Engineer, Supermicro
Hieu Pham, Teaching and Research Fellow, VinUniversity
Glen Berseth, Assistant Professor, U. Montréal / Mila
Alexandra Saizan, Data Science Manager, Guidehouse
Jeannette Bohg, Assistant Professor, Stanford University
Lorenzo Famiglini, PhD student, University of Milano-Bicocca
Julian Dominguez-Schatz, Undergraduate Student, University of Waterloo
Aurèle Tohokantche Gnanha, Ph.D. Candidate, City University of Hong Kong
Mark Dredze, Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University
Mehran Sahami, Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University
Reinier van den Biggelaar, Dean of data science faculty, European Leadership University
Stephan Meyer, Head of AI, Munich Re
Cristina Menghini, Postdoc, Brown University
Nima Ebadi, AI Research Scientist, Murano Corporation
Omar Tawakol, VP, GM, CEO Voicea (acquired), Cisco
Iulian Serban, CEO/CAIO, Korbit
Himalaya Kakshapati, ML Engineer, Imperium Legacy Technology, Inc
Allen Nie, PhD student, Stanford University
Cong Duy Vu Hoang, Senior Applied Scientist, Oracle Corporation
William Kearns, Machine Learning Manager, Headspace Health
Sathya Edamadaka, EE and Physics undergrad, Stanford University, Nuro
Ganesh Mani, Adjunct Faculty, Carnegie Mellon
Luca Kiebel, CTO, Nibyou
Tanmay Sahay, Site Reliability Engineer, Google
Aman Haris, Undergraduate Student, Carnegie Mellon University
Alexandre Duperré, Machine learning engineer, Polytechnique Montreal
Jean-Christophe Rodrigue, Director of Analytics, Ludia
Andrew Maas, Manager, Applied Machine Learning, Apple
Julian Perez Alzueta, Head of Product and Analytics, Our Tandem
Hans Uszkoreit, Scientific Director, DFKI Berlin and Giance
Jonathan Uesato, Research Engineer, DeepMind
James Foulds, Assistant Professor, UMBC
Md Osman Gani, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Kushal Lakhotia, Senior Staff Applied Scientist, Outreach Corp
Haozhu Wang, Research Scientist, Amazon Web Services
Fábio Patroni, PhD student, UNICAMP
Érico Scorpioni, CEO, CheckStore
Tristan Harris, President, Center for humane technology
Setu Shah, Lead Machine Learning Engineer, Headspace Health
Paolo Petta, Univ.-Lektor Dr., Universität Wien, Med.Univ.Vienna, & OFAI
Alex Hanna, Director of Research, Distributed AI Research Institute
