The White House announced this Thursday new measures to encourage responsible innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) and protect the rights and safety of citizens. The Administration of President Joe Biden aspires to advance a “cohesive and comprehensive approach to the risks and opportunities related to AI,” according to the White House. The proliferation of the use of tools such as chatbots, as well as the ability of AI to manipulate and even falsify images, has pushed Washington to try to put a stop to the popularization of its use, on the eve of the start of a new electoral campaign, that of 2024. If disinformation in the virtual sphere has wreaked havoc in recent years, the use of AI to create alternative realities is too high a strategic risk, as revealed this week by the padre from AI, Geoffrey Hinton.
The National Science Foundation (NSF, in its English acronym; government agency) plans to invest an additional 140 million dollars (about 127 million euros) to create seven new National Research Institutes on AI, of a thematic nature, as reported in your website. In total, there will be 25 national AI research institutes in the country, with $500 million in funding to “support responsible innovation” that promotes the public good. For comparison, the tech giant Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAi alone, the company that develops the popular ChatGPT. The Democratic Administration has also pledged to publish draft guidelines for government agencies to ensure that their use of AI safeguards “the rights and safety of the American people,” in addition to getting a commitment from several companies in the sector to submit their products to scrutiny at a cybersecurity conference in August.
The White House has come under increasing pressure to police artificial intelligence since OpenAI made the app publicly available last year, and individuals immediately began using it to search for information, complete schoolwork or get ahead at work. Since then, at a dizzying pace, some of the big tech companies have rushed to incorporate chatbots to their products and have accelerated the spread of AI as a new consumer product. But the also growing existence of false images generated by AI on the Internet is a serious warning, which some experts, including Hinton, have been warning about the misinformation potential of this technology, something especially dangerous in electoral campaigns and in such a polarized country. politically and socially like the US.
In a call with journalists held on Wednesday, a senior Washington official recalled that the Biden Administration “has been leading these issues since long before these new AI products.” “To take advantage of AI, we must start by mitigating its risks. And this basic principle has guided our work on AI from the very beginning,” the source added. In the fall, the White House published the so-called Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, “an important anchor and roadmap” on which the battery of safeguards has been built. Together with the so-called AI Risk Management Framework, it has “given companies and policy makers and the people who generate these technologies some clear ways to mitigate risks,” the senior official said.
The objective seems simple on paper: take advantage of the opportunities of AI and at the same time mitigate its risks, including the possible robotization or automation of jobs, with the consequent destruction of jobs, as denounced by Hinton among others. Like putting a bell on a cat, the Biden Administration places people and communities at the center of its strategy; public good, protection of national security and economy. It follows from the White House appeal that it is companies that have the ultimate responsibility to “make sure their products are safe” before marketing or making them public. And if for this it is necessary to participate, together with the technology companies, “in an independent and public evaluation of their AI systems in the AI Village of DEF CON 31, one of the largest hacker conventions in the world,” said the senior official, the White House will. “These models [de IA] they will be evaluated there by thousands of community partners and experts to see how they align with the values outlined in the draft Bill of Rights and the Risk Management Framework,” the source added. The first will ensure that automated systems protect data privacy and protect users from discriminatory bias, another fear raised by the pervasiveness of AI.
In an article published Wednesday in the daily The New York Times, Lina Khan, president of the Federal Trade Commission —and a well-known scourge of monopolies and technology companies—, pointed out that the US is at a “key decision point” on the matter. Equating the advance of new technology with the birth of giants like Google and Facebook, Khan warned that without proper regulation, technology could entrench the power of the biggest tech companies.
ORIGINAL LINK: The White House plan to mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence – LaPatilla.com (awsccs2.com)