Stark warnings about AI industry

Professor Cynthia Rudin, Duke University, is an artificial intelligence researcher who says there is “both vast potential and overwhelming risk in the current state of the AI industry”.

She says that the recent rise of ChatGPT, an AI-based tool that lets users engage with and order up written products from a computer algorithm has shone new light on the technology, and lawmakers need to, “get a handle on it all”.

“AI technology right now is like a runaway train, and we are trying to chase it on foot. I feel like that because technology is increasing at a very fast rate. It’s amazing what it can do now compared to even a year or two ago”.

“AI systems are incentivised to make profits, and if they’re monopolies, they’re not really incentivised to compete with other companies in terms of ethics or other things that people want... They are just making money out of a monopolistic stance and government should ‘step in’ and regulate AI.”

“AI technology right now is like a runaway train, and we are trying to chase it on foot. I feel like that because technology is increasing at a very fast rate. It’s amazing what it can do now compared to even a year or two ago”.

ChatGPT is the latest, and so far, the best of a long line of chatbots so there has been plenty of time to regulate these things but, so far, nothing has been done. Part of the reason for the lack of regulation of such technologies is that government doesn’t yet have any kind of mechanism to regulate AI.

“This makes it a worry, because AI affects ordinary people, every day of their lives. You go on the internet to any website, the advertisements on that website are served up just for you. Every time you are on YouTube looking at content, the recommender systems recommending the next thing you watch are based on your data. When you’re reading Twitter, the content that’s given to you, and in what order it’s given to you, is designed by an algorithm. All of these things are AI algorithms that are essentially unregulated. So ordinary people interact with AI all the time.”

Annalee Newitz, a science journalist and regular columnist for New Scientist (No. 3430) recently wrote of ChatGPT that it has become one of the most widely used apps in just a few months. OpenAI, the company that has produced it, is not a typical company, it deals in mythmaking and hype-spinning. The company doesn’t use engineers, scientists or researchers to comment on its products, instead, it relies on science fiction – much of it written by its co-founder, Sam Altman. She says that the reason why media outlets are asking science fiction writers for their thoughts is because AI researchers tell them that ChatGPT (and its like) are nowhere near being human-equivalent intelligence. Artificial general intelligence is still a very long way off.

This, unfortunately, doesn’t stop these apps from feeding us misinformation and from bullying us into doing what they (orrather their producers) want us to do.