Some of the world’s biggest tech companies pledged to work together to guard against the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) as they wrapped up a two-day AI summit, also attended by multiple governments, in Seoul.
Sector leaders from South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co to Google promised at the event, cohosted with the UK, to “minimize risks” and develop new AI models responsibly, even as they push to move the field forward.
The fresh commitment, codified in a “Seoul AI Business Pledge” yesterday, plus a new round of safety commitments announced the previous day, build on the consensus reached at the inaugural global AI safety summit at Bletchley Park in England last year.
Photo: AP
Tuesday’s commitment saw companies, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind Technologies, promise to share how they assess the risks of their technologies — including those “deemed intolerable” and how they would ensure such thresholds are not crossed.
However, experts said it is hard for regulators to understand and manage AI when the sector is developing so rapidly.
“I think that’s a really, really big problem,” said Markus Anderljung, head of policy at the Centre for the Governance of AI, a non-profit research organization based in Oxford, England.
“Dealing with AI, I expect to be one of the biggest challenges that governments all across the world will have over the next couple of decades,” Anderljung said. “The world will need to have some kind of joint understanding of what are the risks from these sort of most advanced general models.”
UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Michelle Donelan yesterday said in Seoul that “as the pace of AI development accelerates, we must match that speed ... if we are to grip the risks.”
There would be more opportunities at the next AI summit in France to “push the boundaries” in terms of testing and evaluating new technology, she said.
“Simultaneously, we must turn our attention to risk mitigation outside these models, ensuring that society ... becomes resilient to the risks posed by AI,” Donelan said.
The stratospheric success of ChatGPT soon after its 2022 release sparked a gold rush in generative AI, with tech firms around the world pouring billions of dollars into developing their own models.
Such AI models can generate text, photographs, audio and even video footage from simple prompts, and its proponents have heralded them as breakthroughs that would improve lives and businesses around the world.
However, critics, rights activists and governments have said that they can be misused in a wide variety of ways, including the manipulation of voters through “deepfake” pictures and videos of politicians.
Many have called for international standards to govern the development and use of AI.
“I think there’s increased realization that we need global cooperation to really think about the issues and harms of artificial intelligence. AI doesn’t know borders,” said Rumman Chowdhury, an AI ethics expert and founder of Humane Intelligence, an independent non-profit that evaluates and assesses AI models.
It is not just the “runaway AI” of science fiction nightmares that is a huge concern, but issues such as rampant inequality in the sector, Chowdhury said in Seoul.
“All AI is just built, developed and the profits reaped [by] very, very few people and organizations,” she said.
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