Is AI a danger to society?
Elon Musk and a group
of tech experts are calling for a six-month pause in the training of
advanced artificial intelligence models following ChatGPT’s rise –
arguing the systems could pose “profound risks to society and humanity.”
The
CEO of Twitter and Tesla joined more than 1,000 experts in signing an
open letter organized by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, which
is primarily funded by the Musk Foundation.
The
group also gets funds from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and
the effective altruism group Founders Pledge, the European Union’s
transparency register shows.
The
letter details potential risks that advanced AI poses without proper
oversight and calls for an industrywide pause until proper safety
protocols have been developed and vetted by independent experts.
Risks
include the spread of “propaganda and untruth,” job losses, the
development of “nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber,
outsmart, obsolete and replace us,” and the risk of “loss of control of
our civilization.”
The
experts pointed out that OpenAI itself recently acknowledged it may
soon be necessary to “get independent review before starting to train
future systems.”
“Therefore, we call
on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training
of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4,” the letter says. “This pause
should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors.”
Musk
was a co-founder and early investor in OpenAI, the firm responsible for
the development of ChatGPT. He has since left OpenAI’s board of
directors and no longer has any involvement in its operations.
Shivon
Zilis, an AI expert who gave birth to twins fathered by Musk via in
vitro fertilization, also recently stepped down from OpenAI’s board. She
had served as an adviser to OpenAI since 2016. Zilis, 37, is an
executive at Neuralink, Musk’s brain chip company.
Despite
his self-proclaimed fears about AI, Musk is reportedly exploring the
possibility of developing a rival to ChatGPT, according to NY Post.
Microsoft-backed
OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, the latest version of its AI chatbot, has both
shocked the public with its ability to generate life-like responses to a
huge variety of prompts and stoked fears that AI will place many jobs
at risk and ease the spread of misinformation.
Other
notable signers of the letter include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak,
Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp and at least three employees affiliated
with DeepMind, an AI research lab owned by Google parent Alphabet.
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has not signed the letter.
Active
AI labs and experts “should use this pause to jointly develop and
implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and
development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent
outside experts” to ensure the systems are “safe beyond a reasonable
doubt,” the letter adds.
“Such
decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders,” the letter
says. “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are
confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be
manageable.”
“This
does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping
back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box
models with emergent capabilities,” the letter adds.
Elon
Musk has repeatedly warned about the danger posed by the unrestrained
development of AI technology – describing it last month as “one of
the biggest risks to the future of civilization.”
Musk likened AI to the discovery of nuclear physics, which led to “nuclear power generation but also nuclear bombs.”
“I
think we need to regulate AI safety, frankly,” Musk said. “Think of any
technology which is potentially a risk to people, like if it’s aircraft
or cars or medicine, we have regulatory bodies that oversee the public
safety of cars and planes and medicine.”
“I
think we should have a similar set of regulatory oversight for
artificial intelligence, because I think it is actually a bigger risk to
society,” he added.
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