(VitalNews.org) – In what can only be described as a masterful understatement, Sam Altman, CEO of San Francisco-based OpenAI, the company that has developed Chat GPT, has said that in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), “if things can go wrong, then they could go quite wrong.”
Altman was speaking at a Senate committee hearing and was responding to a question concerning what might happen if AI were not properly regulated. His paraphrasing of Murphy’s law – if anything can go wrong, then it will – demonstrated that he felt it could cause significant harm to mankind.
He indicated that he would like to work with the government to stop that happening and drew a comparison with the early days of Photoshop development before most people realized the extent of what could be done in the field of image manipulation and the consequences of producing digital images that were indistinguishable from the real thing. “This will be very much like that, but on steroids,” he said.
During the hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, which focused on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, senators from both of the major parties were in broad agreement that AI needed regulation, although it was undecided on exactly what might need to be done in order to achieve that goal.
Some senators were concerned that AI systems developed in China might be used to persuade and manipulate people to adopt a “pro-China” point of view, while others were concerned about the loss of privacy, loss of jobs, manipulation of personal opinion and personal behavior, and especially the destabilizing of elections in the United States.
However, Altman was optimistic that AI would create more jobs than it destroys, and pointed to the example of Christina Montgomery, the IBM Chief Privacy and Trust Officer who was also present at the hearing, noting that she heads a team of AI governance professionals, a category of jobs which did not exist before the development of AI.
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