[ad_1]
The head of the artificial intelligence company that created ChatGPT told Congress on Tuesday that government intervention would be critical to reducing the risks of increasingly powerful AI systems.
“As this technology advances, we know that people are worried about how it will change the way we live. We are too,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at a US Senate hearing.
Altman proposed the creation of a US or global agency that would license the most powerful AI systems and have the authority to “remove those licenses and ensure compliance with security standards.”
The San Francisco-based startup gained public attention after releasing ChatGPT late last year. ChatGPT is a free chatbot tool that answers questions with human-like responses.
What started as panic among educators about the use of ChatGPT to cheat on homework assignments has evolved into concerns about the ability of the latest “generative AI” tools to mislead people, spread falsehoods, violate copyright protection and increase some jobs.
And while there’s no immediate sign Congress will enact new AI rules, as European lawmakers have done, public concern brought Altman and other tech CEOs to the White House earlier this month and has led US agencies to pledge to phase out dangerous AI products. which violates existing civil rights and consumer protection laws.
Senator presents a voice clone of himself
Senator Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee on privacy, technology and law, opened the hearing with a recorded speech that sounded like a senator, but actually a voice clone trained on Blumenthal’s floor speech and read a speech written by ChatGPT after he requested a chatbot to compose the introduction.
The results were impressive, said Blumenthal, but he added, “What if I had asked, and what if I had provided, the endorsement of Ukraine gave up or [Russian President] Vladimir Putin’s leadership?”
To open a hearing on artificial intelligence, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal played a recorded statement created entirely by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and AI voice cloning software trained on his own speech to imitate his voice. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also testified at the hearing, urging the government to regulate artificial intelligence.
Blumenthal said AI companies should be required to test their systems and disclose known risks before releasing them, and expressed particular concern about how future AI systems could disrupt the labor market.
Pressed on fears about AI, Altman mostly avoided specifics, except to say that the industry could pose “significant danger to the world” and that “if this technology goes wrong, it could go wrong.”
Altman is going on a policy tour
But he later suggested that new regulatory agencies should implement safeguards that would prevent AI models that can “replicate themselves and exfiltrate themselves into the wild” – reflecting futuristic concerns about advanced AI systems that could trick humans into taking control.
Co-founded by Altman in 2015 with the backing of tech billionaire Elon Musk, OpenAI has evolved from a non-profit research lab with a safety-focused mission into a business. Other popular AI products include the DALL-E image maker. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into startups and has incorporated the technology into its own products, including the Bing search engine.
Altman also plans to begin a world tour this month to national capitals and major cities on six continents to talk about technology with policymakers and the public. On the eve of his Senate testimony, he dined with dozens of US lawmakers, some of whom told CNBC they were impressed by his comments.
Also testifying were IBM’s chief privacy and trust officer, Christina Montgomery, and Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus at New York University who was among a group of AI experts calling on OpenAI and other tech companies to pause development of more powerful AI models. six months to give the public more time to consider the risks. The letter is a response to the March release of the latest OpenAI model, GPT-4, which is described as more powerful than ChatGPT.
The panel’s ranking Republican, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, said technology has big implications for elections, jobs and national security. He said Tuesday’s hearing marked “a critical first step in figuring out what Congress needs to do.”
Some tech industry leaders say they welcome some form of AI oversight but have cautioned against what they see as overly onerous rules. Altman and Marcus both called for AI-focused regulators, preferably international ones, with Altman citing the precedent of the UN nuclear agency and Marcus comparing it to the US Food and Drug Administration. But IBM’s Montgomery instead urged Congress to take a “precision regulatory” approach.
“We think that AI should be regulated at the point of risk, essentially,” Montgomery said, establishing rules governing the deployment of specific uses of AI rather than the technology itself.
[ad_2]
Source link