Faced with its ingenuity and ability to accomplish a lot of tasks in record time and with great accuracy, artificial intelligence (AI) has raised concerns among many regulators, experts and even its founders.
Warnings have multiplied even from some of those behind the development of ChatGPT software. As the European Union slowly progresses toward its regulation, the rapid rise of technology seems to be overtaking all.
“We need global regulation,” Sam Altman, head of Open AI, told the US Senate on Tuesday, expressing his fear that this technology could “cause massive harm to the world, by manipulating elections or causing unrest.” in the labor market.”
Like him, American tech giants are demanding that its use be framed as new AI services are announced every week.
That’s why Christina Montgomery, IBM’s vice president of trust and privacy, called for regulating the industry without stifling innovation. In April, Google Chairman Sundar Pichai said that “in the long term, it will be necessary to develop global regulation” but that “we are still in the beginning”.
But dissidents from Big Tech are the most ferocious, including Jeffrey Hinton, the 75-year-old co-founder of artificial intelligence who quit Google in early May to raise awareness of the threat.
At the end of March, more than a thousand personalities demanded that research on artificial intelligence be stopped for a period of six months, including Elon Musk, who is also working on developing an artificial intelligence company, and thinker Yuval Noa Harari, who is convinced that artificial intelligence can destroy humanity.
“We don’t want a world where five companies put humanity on the plane of artificial intelligence without thinking about the future we want,” said activist Tristan Harris, Google’s former chief ethics officer.
Lessons learned?
In Europe, researchers, experts and regulators are above all sounding the alarm, and in recent weeks anti-AI rhetoric has multiplied.
Consultants from the company “Vae Solis” confirmed to the French newspaper “Le Monde” that “the production of false images and videos by means of artificial intelligence poses an unprecedented danger to the upcoming elections.”
“There is an urgent need to take back control of artificial intelligence, which is liable to cause unprecedented social unrest,” added artificial intelligence researcher OG Bersini.
Meanwhile, the European Union is making progress on its “artificial intelligence law”. Last week, the European Parliament approved a framework that must be voted on in June. But it will take years before it can be implemented.
The text would require generative AI systems such as ChatGPT to obtain prior permission and be transparent to their algorithms and data.
“Everyone agrees on the need for rules, even companies,” says expert Ivana Bartoletti, director of privacy at consultancy Wipro. She confirms that thinking is under way at the level of the Council of Europe, the United States and the United Nations.
“We need to not make alarmist statements, as this will only frighten people rather than help them learn to use AI responsibly,” Bartoletti adds.
But in Europe as in the United States, economic circles are focusing on the race towards artificial intelligence due to its economic potential as well as its geopolitical importance, as it is “an element of national security,” says the CEO of “Google”.
In Europe, pro-AI companies and politicians fear that the “AI law” will do more harm than good.
“We should take lessons from the European regulation for personal data. Instead of slowing down the big digital companies, it gave them an advantage,” says Gilles Papineh in the French magazine La Tribune, because only big tech has the necessary army of lawyers. Papineh is the president of France’s government-appointed National Digital Council.
He adds that it is not an argument to follow the example of the Italian data protection authority, which banned “Chat GBT” for three weeks because it collected data without permission, and then re-licensed the US software after its commitment to comply but faces similar complaints elsewhere in the European Union.
“Europe cannot miss such an important technological breakthrough again. The version of the AI law amounts to a de facto ban on the appearance of models in European languages” for text analysis, translation and machine-to-machine communication, Cedric Au, former French Minister of the Digital Sphere, asserted.
Google announced this week that Bard, a competitor to its ChatGPT artificial intelligence tool, has been deployed in 180 countries and territories. But not in the European Union.
#Artificial #intelligence #raises #concerns #among #founders