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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
With the rapid advancements in Al, are policies required to keep the technology in check? by Henry J. Lindborg
"The development of full artificial intelligence [Al] could spell the end of the human race," Stephen Hawking warned back in 2014?
Just one component of full Al-natural language processing-was the technology behind the November 2022 release of Open Al's Chat GPT-3 (generative pretrained transformer), which dramatically raised public awareness of the scope and risks of Al. The revelation that a free gadget is multilingual and capable of routine tasks across industries, as well as creative writing (and remarkable academic plagiarism), struck with the force of an epiphany: Risks from similar technology creating disinformation through deepfakes-a fraudulent 2022 video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy surrendering to Russia,2 for example-and cloning voices for scams prompted a Federal Trade Commission caution about deceptive Al practices?
Despite perceived threats to jobs from copywriting to law, academic integrity and confidence in digital communications, human extinction didn't ensue. A March 2023 Future of Life Institute open letter calling for "all Al labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of Al systems more powerful than GPT-4,"4 however, was signed by prominent figures from technology, academia and politics, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuval Noah Harari and Andrew Yang, along with 25,000 others.