OpenAI Sen. Richard Blumenthal: Regulatory Reform and the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Legislating Private Sector Crime and Consumer Laws
Kicking off a series of AI hearings Tuesday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) used a text-to-voice generator trained on hours of his speeches to deliver an opening statement before OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think there is a real incentive for Congress to move more quickly. The congress is trying to figure out what’s going on with the technology. What is the role of the government in regulating this?
“We believe that the benefits of the tools we have deployed so far vastly outweigh the risks,” Altman said in his opening testimony. “However, we think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.”
We should maximize the good over the bad. Congress has a choice now. We faced the same choice when we were on social media. Blumenthal said that they failed to seize that moment. We need to do it onArtificial Intelligence before the threats and risks become real.
“Having seen how agencies work in this government, they usually get captured by the interests that they’re supposed to regulate,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said, taking a line similar to his position on other tech companies. “Why don’t we just let people sue you?”
Lawmakers have introduced bills to limit the use of artificial intelligence. Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) put out a bill requiring new disclosures in political ads that use AI-generated content. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) put out companion legislation in the Senate ahead of the hearing.
Regulators are currently focusing on how they could better regulate the industry. In April, the Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Justice Department, and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a joint statement warning companies that they already had the authority to go after them when their products harm users — whatever steps Congress ultimately takes.
Propagation of Artificial Intelligence: How Can We Control Proliferation? A.I. Changes and Problems in the 21st Century
It’s an acknowledgment both that A.I. is growing by leaps and bounds — Microsoft researchers recently published a paper asserting that its technology has shown signs of human reasoning — and that it had worried some pioneers in the field.
Enforcement agencies are also staying vigilant: Lina Khan, the F.T.C.’s chair, warned recently of potential anticompetitive practices by tech giants pursuing A.I., as well as of potential fraud enabled by new products.
Vice President Harris met with top A.I executives such as Mr. Altman, as the Biden administration supported the creation of new rules and government investment.
Sam was chosen as the C.E.O. of OpenAI, and has become a notable advocate of the next generation of artificial intelligence offerings. ChatGPT, his company’s most notable product, has captured the public’s imagination like no tech product has in years, inspiring hopes and fears about its transformative powers.
And we see some bad actors use them for things like helping to design better chemical or biological weapons or cyber attacks. And it’s really hard to defend against that if there aren’t guardrails in place and if anyone can access this just as easily as anyone can hop on the internet today. And so thinking about how do we control proliferation, how do we ensure the systems that are being built are safe is really essential.
There is a wide proliferation of very powerful artificial intelligence systems that could potentially do a lot of good things and a lot of bad things.
Timnit Gebru, the Center for New American Security, a future director of the Artificial Intelligence Agency (CNEAS)
There isn’t a consensus. I think part of it is that it can mean many different things. Facial recognition can be used in finance or medicine. And there’s going to be a lot of industry-specific regulation.
The role of Congress is valuable but there’s a big gap between the pace of technology and lawmaking.
Who is he? Paul is the Vice President at the Center for a New American Security. His work focuses on artificial intelligence and how it intersects with power.
Artificial intelligence is more developed quickly than regulators can keep up with, according to experts. There is no chance of picking up that slack.
The ideas that were introduced years ago by researchers like Timnit Gebru, who was removed from the company after a dispute about a research, were endorsed by those who supported the idea of requiring public documentation of an artificial intelligence system’s limitations.
The senators did not suggest a name for the prospective agency or map out its possible functions in detail. They also also discussed less radical regulatory responses to recent progress in AI.