Biden sees potential risks to AI, urges companies to ensure the safety of their products
US President Joe Biden said it was not yet clear whether artificial intelligence carried risks, but stressed that tech companies have a responsibility to ensure the safety of their products before announcing them.
Biden told his council of advisers on science and technology that artificial intelligence can help cure disease and combat climate change, but it's also important to address its potential risks to society, national security and the economy.
"In my view, tech companies have a responsibility to make sure their products are safe before they are advertised," he said at the start of his meeting with the board yesterday.
When asked if AI was dangerous, he said: "It's not clear yet. It could be."
Safeguards needed
The US president said social media had already shown the damage that high-tech can cause without proper safeguards.
"In the absence of safeguards, we see their impact on mental health, self-image, feelings and despair, especially among young people."
He reiterated his call for Congress to pass privacy legislation to restrict personal data collected by tech companies, ban ads targeting children and prioritize health and safety in product development.
Artificial intelligence has become a hot topic for policymakers, with the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Policy on Technology Ethics asking the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to block OpenAI from releasing new commercial versions of GPT-4 technology that has amazed users with its human-like ability to generate written responses to what is asked of it.
Musk's
warnings US billionaire Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and executives called in an open letter for a six-month halt in developing systems more powerful than the chat robot ChatGPT-4 launched recently by OpenAI, citing the potential risks of such applications to society. Raising fears is the frantic competition among tech giants to develop these AI tools.
Google entered the race last month with the public release of its chat robot (Bard), seeking to attract subscribers and get feedback on the program with which it competes with ChatGPT, which is powered by its competitor Microsoft in the world of artificial intelligence.
Google describes Bard as an experiment that allows collaboration with generative artificial intelligence, a technology that relies on historical data to create content rather than just recognize and identify it.