The vice president of Microsoft, Brad Smith, has spoken out in favour of stronger regulation of artificial intelligence. "There are some ground rules that can be tackled very quickly," Smith told the F.A.S. "If humans are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of skin color or gender, then artificial intelligence should not be allowed to do so."

Patrick Bernau

Editor responsible for economy and "value" of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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Society must establish further rules over time, including through experiments with the new technology, Smith said. "Then it is imperative that governments legislate to ensure that everyone abides by those rules."

Declaration of love to a journalist

Microsoft is currently integrating artificial intelligence into its search engine Bing. The company also takes into account findings from the ChatGPT program, which comes from Microsoft's cooperation partner Open AI and has triggered an artificial intelligence hype in recent weeks. Such software is in principle a more expensive variant of the autocorrect software of mobile phones: It guesses which words could be one behind the other in which context. Again and again, errors in the answers prove that such software does not yet have a deep understanding of the world.

Microsoft's chat has already confessed its love to a journalist of the "New York Times" in a long conversation and christened itself Sydney. "To be honest, we didn't design this for these kinds of conversations," Smith told the F.A.S. "It's perhaps not surprising that some journalists used this technique in ways I never thought of. But now that we understand that, it's good to know that we can fix this within a day or two." In the meantime, Microsoft has limited the length of individual calls.

Attack on Google

Smith attacked Google and its dominance in the field of search engines. "Search engines have not changed nearly as much in recent years as other areas of technology," the lawyer said. "They certainly became more profitable with more ads, which was good for Google and even for Microsoft. But I believe that this market will benefit from more competition."