WASHINGTON: The White House has told top executives of tech giants, including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, that they must protect people from the imminent dangers of artificial intelligence (AI).
At a meeting, the White House told Google chief executive officer (CEO) Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman that they had a “moral” duty to protect society.
According to the BBC, the White House clarified that it might regulate the tech sector further.
The meeting at the White House took place in the backdrop of recently launched AI tools such as ChatGPT and Bard, which have increased public interest in their novelty.
The AI tools provide ordinary people with the option to work with so-called “generative AI,” which has the ability to produce poetry, debug computer code, summarise information from numerous sources in a matter of seconds, and sum up information from multiple sources in a matter of seconds that sound as if they might have been human-generated.
Their rollout has sparked new debate over the role of AI in society by offering a palpable illustration of the possible risks and rewards of the latest technology.
Technology bosses summoned to the White House on Thursday were told it was up to tech companies to “ensure the safety and security of their products”.
According to the BBC, they were warned that the Biden administration was mulling over new regulations and legislation covering artificial intelligence.
Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAi, the company behind ChatGPT, told media persons that in terms of regulation, tech executives were “surprisingly on the same page on what needs to be done.”
US Vice-President Kamala Harris said in a statement after the meeting that the new technology could pose a severe risk to safety, privacy and civil rights, although it also has the potential to improve lives.
“The private (tech) sector has “an ethical, moral and above all legal responsibility to ensure the safety and security of their products,” she said.
Calls for better regulation of emerging AI tools have been coming thick and fast from politicians and tech executives alike.
Earlier this week, Geoffrey Hinton, considered the “godfather” of AI, quit his job at Google stating that he regretted his work.
He said that some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “quite scary”.
There are also concerns that AI would rapidly render people jobless, as well as worries that chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard could be inaccurate and lead to the propagation of misinformation.
There are also concerns that generative AI may flout copyright law. Voice cloning AI could exacerbate fraud and AI-generated videos could spread fake news.
However, advocates like Bill Gates have rebelled against calls for an AI “pause” saying such a move would not “solve the challenges” ahead.
Gates argues that it would be better to focus on how best to use the developments in AI.
And others believe that there is a danger of over-regulating, which would give a strategic advantage to tech firms in China.
