Head of AI company ChatGPT testifies at US Congress about implications for elections

"I am nervous about it," OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said about elections and artificial intelligence.

He said government intervention would be critical to mitigating the risks of increasingly powerful AI systems.

"As this technology advances, we understand that people are anxious about how it could change the way we live. We are too."

For months, companies large and small have raced to bring increasingly versatile AI to market, throwing endless data and billions of dollars at the challenge.

Some critics fear the technology will exacerbate societal harms, among them prejudice and misinformation, while others warn AI could end humanity itself.

Josh Hawley, a US Senator for Missouri, said: "We could be looking at one of the most significant technological innovations in human history."

"My question is, what kind of innovation is it going to be? Is it going to be like the printing press … Or is it going to be more like the atom bomb?"

"There's no way to put this genie in the bottle. Globally, this is exploding," said Senator Cory Booker, one of many lawmakers with questions about how best to regulate AI.

Senator Mazie Hirono noted the danger of misinformation as the 2024 election nears.

"In the election context, for example, I saw a picture of former President Trump being arrested by NYPD and that went viral," she said, pressing Mr Altman on whether he would consider the faked image harmful.

Mr Altman responded that creators should make clear when an image is generated rather than factual.

He also said companies should have the right to say they do not want their data used for AI training, which is one idea being discussed on Capitol Hill.

Mr Altman said, however, that material on the public web would be fair game.

He also said he "Wouldn't say never" to the idea of advertising but preferred a subscription-based model.

Pressed on his own worst fear about AI, Mr Altman mostly avoided specifics, except to say that the industry could cause "Significant harm to the world" and that "if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong". 

However, he later proposed that a new regulatory agency should impose safeguards that would block AI models that could "self-replicate and self-exfiltrate into the wild", hinting at futuristic concerns about advanced AI systems that could manipulate humans into ceding control.

Concerns about emerging technology:

The White House has convened top technology chief executives, including Mr Altman, to address AI concerns.

Likewise, US politicians are seeking action to further the technology's benefits and national security while limiting its misuse.

However, consensus is far from certain.

Mr Altman's San Francisco-based startup rocketed to public attention after it released ChatGPT late last year.

ChatGPT is a free chatbot tool that answers questions with convincingly human-like responses.

What started out as a panic among educators about ChatGPT's use to cheat on homework assignments has expanded to broader concerns about the ability of the latest crop of "generative AI" tools to mislead people, spread falsehoods, violate copyright protections and up-end some jobs.

Senator Richard Blumenthal — the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law — opened the hearing with a recorded speech that sounded like the senator, but was actually a voice clone trained on Senator Blumenthal's floor speeches and reciting a speech written by ChatGPT after he asked the chatbot to compose his opening remarks.

The result was impressive, said Senator Blumenthal, but he added: "What if I had asked it, and what if it had provided, an endorsement of Ukraine surrendering or [Russian President] Vladimir Putin's leadership?"

Senator Blumenthal said AI companies ought to be required to test their systems and disclose known risks before releasing them, and expressed particular concern about how future AI systems could destabilise the job market.

An OpenAI staffer recently proposed the creation of a US licensing agency for AI, which could be called the Office for AI Safety and Infrastructure Security, or OASIS, Reuters has reported.

OpenAI is backed by Microsoft Corp. Mr Altman is also calling for global cooperation on AI and incentives for safety compliance.

Christina Montgomery — International Business Machines (IBM) Corp's chief privacy and trust officer — urged Congress to focus regulation on areas with the potential to do the greatest societal harm.

"We think that AI should be regulated at the point of risk, essentially," Ms Montgomery said, by establishing rules that govern the deployment of specific uses of AI rather than the technology itself.

Also testifying was Gary Marcus — a professor emeritus at New York University — who was among a group of AI experts who called on OpenAI and other tech firms to pause their development of more-powerful AI models for six months to give society more time to consider the risks.

The letter was a response to the March release of OpenAI's latest model, GPT-4, described as more powerful than ChatGPT.

Professor Marcus said the current use of AI could whip up a "perfect storm" of dangerous misinformation. 

"We are also facing a perfect storm of corporate irresponsibility, widespread deployment, lack of adequate regulation and inherent unreliability," he said. 

"AI is among the most world-changing technologies ever, already changing things more rapidly than almost any technology in history."

Source | Reuters