Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, used his US Senate appearance on Tuesday to offer words of warning for the technology that he helped become mainstream.
Altman, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with financial backing from Elon Musk, warned that if artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology go wrong, “it can go quite wrong”.
“OpenAI was founded on the belief that artificial intelligence has the potential to improve nearly every aspect of our lives, but also that it creates serious risks,” said Altman, however, he added, “we think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models”.
He proposed a regulatory body with the power to grant and provoke licences to ensure compliance with safety standards.
Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and OpenAI’s Dalle-E-2 software can create increasingly humanlike text, speech and visuals. Their skyrocketing popularity has brought with it concerns over national security, copyright protection and misinformation.
Democrat senator Richard Blumenthal opened the Tuesday hearing with a computer-generated simulacrum of his voice, which a computer can convincingly imitate after mere hours of learning.
“If you were listening from home, you might have thought that voice was mine and the words from me, but in fact, that voice was not mine,” said Blumenthal.
Artificial intelligence technologies “are more than just research experiments. They are no longer fantasies of science fiction, they are real and present,” said Blumenthal.
“What if I had asked it, and what if it had provided, an endorsement of Ukraine surrendering or Vladimir Putin’s leadership?” he asked Capitol Hill.
Republican senator John Lawley voiced concerns to Congress over AI’s impact on elections, jobs and national security.
Altman proposed a combination of licensing and testing requirements before more powerful tools are released to the public, echoing concerns laid out in a letter cosigned by Musk, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) co-founder Steve Wozniak, top AI professors Stuart Russell, Yoshua Bengio and Gary Marcus, and founders of AI startups Stability AI, Character.ai, Unanimous AI and Attain.ai.
AI ‘godfather’ Geoffrey Hinton, who resigned from Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) in May, voiced similar concerns, warning that it was only a matter of time before AI became more intelligent than humans.
Altman has scheduled a global tour this month, visiting national capitals and major cities across six continents to engage policymakers and the public in discussions about AI.