ChatGPT chief says artificial intelligence should be regulated by a US or global agency
The head of the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT told Congress on Tuesday that government intervention will 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,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at a Senate hearing.
Altman proposed the formation of a U.S. or global agency that would license the most powerful AI systems and have the authority to “take that license away and ensure compliance with safety standards.”
His San Francisco-based startup rocketed to public attention after it released ChatGPT late last year. The free chatbot tool 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 upend some jobs.
And while there’s no immediate sign Congress will craft sweeping new AI rules, as European lawmakers are doing, the societal concerns brought Altman and other tech CEOs to the White House earlier this month and have led U.S. agencies to promise to crack down on harmful AI products that break existing civil rights and consumer protection laws.
Sen. 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 Blumenthal’s floor speeches and reciting ChatGPT-written opening remarks.
The result was impressive, said 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?”
The overall tone of senators’ questioning was polite Tuesday, a contrast to past congressional hearings in which tech and social media executives faced tough grillings over the industry’s failures to manage data privacy or counter harmful misinformation.
