> To be honest, I was a bit surprised by the enthusiasm of the researchers in ethics I contacted

It's a hot topic right now and there's a fear that ordinary people will gain dangerous superpowers from machine learning models. So many people want to lock down access to and tighten controls, to regulate and have them edited and knobbled in ways that suit their agenda to the detriment of others.

Ethics researchers will have extraordinary powers if this comes to pass, and they are quite rightly very excited about this shift in power away from technologists.