“My worst fear is that we cause serious harm — we, this sector, the tech industry — to the world. I think that could happen in a number of different ways. That’s why we started this company,” Altman said during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law on May 16.
Biggest fear: AI can be wrong
“People think that if this technology goes wrong, it could go bad, and we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening,” said Altman, CEO of OpenAI (the developer of ChatGPT).
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is sworn in during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee. (Photo: Washington Post)
In his first congressional testimony, Altman also called for broad regulation, including a new government agency responsible for licensing AI models, to address growing concerns that artificial intelligence could distort reality and create unprecedented safety risks.
Mr. Altman has taken a serious stance on the ways in which artificial intelligence could “cause significant harm to the world,” and expressed a willingness to work with lawmakers to address the risks posed by his company’s ChatGPT and other AI tools.
Mr. Altman outlined “risky” behaviors enabled by technology like ChatGPT, including the spread of “live interactive misinformation” and emotional manipulation. He acknowledged that AI could be used to target drone attacks.
“If this technology goes wrong, it could be bad,” he said.
Yet, during nearly three hours of discussion about the potentially dire consequences, Mr. Altman insisted that his company would continue to roll out AI technology.
Rather than taking a risk, he argues, “iterative deployments” of OpenAI’s AI models give organizations time to understand potential threats, a strategic move that puts “relatively weak” and “imperfect” technology into the world to help uncover the associated safety risks.
Illustration of the ChatGPT application, which allows computers to chat with users like a human.
Over the past several weeks, Mr. Altman has been on a global goodwill tour, meeting privately with policymakers including President Biden and members of Congress to address concerns about the rapid deployment of ChatGPT and other technologies.
The May 16 hearing marks the first chance for the broader public to hear his message, at a time when Washington is increasingly struggling to regulate a technology that has disrupted jobs, facilitated fraud and spread misinformation.
In stark contrast to hearings with other tech CEOs, such as TikTok's Shou Zi Chew and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, US lawmakers gave Mr Altman a relatively warm reception.
They appeared to be in listening mode, expressing openness to considering suggestions from Altman and two other witnesses at the hearing: IBM executive Christina Montgomery and New York University professor emeritus Gary Marcus.
During a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, lawmakers expressed deep concerns about the rapid development of artificial intelligence, arguing that recent advances could be more transformative than the internet, or as dangerous as the atomic bomb.
“This is your opportunity to tell us how to do this right,” Senator John Neely Kennedy told witnesses. “Use it.”
Lawmakers from both parties have expressed openness to the idea of creating a government agency tasked with regulating the development of artificial intelligence, although previous efforts to create a specific agency with Silicon Valley oversight have failed in Congress as the parties have been divided over how to shape such a massive agency.
It is unclear whether such a proposal would gain widespread support among Republicans, who are generally wary of expanding government power. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, warned that such an agency could be “trapped by the interests they are supposed to regulate.”
Senator Richard Blumenthal, chairman of the subcommittee, praised Mr. Altman's testimony at the hearing: “Sam Altman is a world apart from other CEOs... Not just in his words and rhetoric but in his actual actions and his willingness to engage and commit to concrete action.”
The hearing with CEO Altman comes as Washington policymakers are increasingly concerned about the threats posed by artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT and other innovative AI tools, particularly in relation to disinformation, data privacy, copyright infringement, and cybersecurity.
Lawmakers have expressed regret over their relatively lax approach to the AI industry since before the 2016 election. Their first hearing with Meta CEO Zuckerberg took place in 2018, when Facebook was already a giant and fresh from the Cambridge Analytica scandal that harvested data from 87 million Facebook users.
At the time, despite broad bipartisan consensus that AI posed a threat, lawmakers failed to agree on rules to govern its use or development.
(Source: Tin Tuc Newspaper/Fox News; Washington Post)
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