Congress isn’t great with Big Tech, but it still seems optimistic about Artificial Intelligence
Social Media, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future: Sen. Richard Blumenthal and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Addressing a Senate Hearing on AI
Senator Richard Blumenthal used a text-to-voice generator to speak in front of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday.
There’s an incentive for Congress to move faster, I think. I think what members of Congress are trying to do here with these hearings is figure out what’s going on with AI and then what is the role that government needs to play to regulate this?
The benefits of the tools we have deployed so far vastly outweigh the risks, said Alexander Altman in his opening testimony. “However, we think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.”
There isn’t much of a defense against the bad stuff because there is only an agency that can address these questions from social media. “We absolutely have to have an agency.”
“Having seen how agencies work in this government, they usually get captured by the interests that they’re supposed to regulate,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said, taking a line similar to his position on other tech companies. Is it because we just let people file lawsuits against you?
Some lawmakers have already introduced bills to restrict the use of AI across industries. The bill by the Representative required new disclosures in political ads that used artificial intelligence. The Senate put out companion legislation for the hearing.
Regulators are starting to look at how they can better regulate the industry. In April, the Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Justice Department, and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a joint statement warning companies that they already had the authority to go after them when their products harm users — whatever steps Congress ultimately takes.
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It is an acknowledgement both that A.I is growing by leaps and bounds and that Microsoft researchers recently published a paper asserting that their technology has shown signs of human reasoning.
The chair of the F.T.C warned about potential anticompetitive practices by tech giants pursuing A.I., as well as potential fraud enabled by new products.
This month, Vice President Kamala Harris met with top A.I. executives, including Mr. Altman, as the Biden administration said it supported legislative efforts to create new rules and government investment.
As the C.E.O. of OpenAI, Sam Altman has become one of the most prominent evangelists for the next generation of artificial intelligence offerings. The public’s imagination has been captured by the company’s most notable product, which has evoked hopes and fears about its power.
And we see some bad actors use them for things like helping to design better chemical or biological weapons or cyber attacks. It’s really hard to argue against that if there aren’t guardrails in place and anyone can access it on the internet. Ensuring the systems that are being built are safe is essential, and thinking about how we control proliferation is essential.
There is a chance that we see a wide proliferation of very powerful AI systems that could do a lot of bad things.
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There’s certainly not a consensus. And I think part of it is that it can mean so many different things. It can be facial recognition, or be used in finance or medicine. A lot of industry-specific regulation is on the way.
There is definitely a valuable role for Congress, but there’s a huge disconnect between the pace of the technology, especially in AI, and the pace of lawmaking.
Who is he? The vice president at the Center for a New American Security is an author called Paul Scharre. Artificial intelligence intersects with power in his work.
Artificial intelligence is developing far more quickly than regulators can keep up with, according to experts. Is there any chance of picking up that slack?
Those included endorsing the idea of requiring public documentation of AI systems’ limitations or the datasets used to create them, akin to an AI nutrition label, ideas introduced years ago by researchers like former Google Ethical AI team lead Timnit Gebru who was ousted from the company after a dispute about a prescient research paper warning about the limitations and dangers of large language models.
The senators didn’t suggest a name or give a map of the possible functions of the agency. They also also discussed less radical regulatory responses to recent progress in AI.
