A group of well-known AI ethicists have written a counterpoint to this week’s controversial letter asking for a six-month “pause” on AI development, criticizing it for a focus on hypothetical future threats when real harms are attributable to misuse of the tech today.

Thousands of people, including such familiar names as Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk, signed the open letter from the Future of Life institute earlier this week, proposing that development of AI models like GPT-4 should be put on hold in order to avoid “loss of control of our civilization,” among other threats.

Timnit Gebru, Emily M. Bender, Angelina McMillan-Major and Margaret Mitchell are all major figures in the domains of AI and ethics, known (in addition to their work) for being pushed out of Google over a paper criticizing the capabilities of AI. They are currently working together at the DAIR Institute, a new research outfit aimed at studying and exposing and preventing AI-associated harms.

But they were not to be found on the list of signatories, and now have published a rebuke calling out the letter’s failure to engage with existing problems caused by the tech.

“Those hypothetical risks are the focus of a dangerous ideology called longtermism that ignores the actual harms resulting from the deployment of AI systems today,” they wrote, citing worker exploitation, data theft, synthetic media that props up existing power structures and the further concentration of those power structures in fewer hands.