Over the past year and change writing for The ReidOut Blog — particularly, regarding the dangers and pitfalls of emerging artificial intelligence technology — it’s been common for me to express concern that lawmakers haven’t been leading the charge in these discussions.
Fortunately, and perhaps because these technologies have become nearly impossible to ignore, some lawmakers are beginning to highlight the harm these technologies can do.
Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., is the latest lawmaker to voice concern over AI’s potentially harmful impacts on children and society as a whole. On Tuesday, he sent a letter to the CEOs of several top tech companies, including Google, Meta, Snap, Microsoft and OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company responsible for the widely discussed ChatGPT.
Chatbots like ChatGPT or AI technologies that produce things — anything from term papers to pencil drawings — are classified as “generative AI.” Such artificial intelligence is a departure from the way AI has commonly been used — that is, to curate things (like your social media feed) rather than create things.
In his letter, Bennet said:
I write with concerns about the rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into search engines, social media platforms, and other consumer products heavily used by teenagers and children. Although generative AI has enormous potential, the race to integrate it into everyday applications cannot come at the expense of younger users’ safety and wellbeing.
The letter cites various news reports about chatbots offering troubling responses, including a Snap chatbot’s advising a user it believed to be a 13-year-old girl about how best to lose her virginity to a 31-year-old; an Open AI chatbot’s saying that a user should die by suicide; and a Bing (Microsoft) chatbot’s chilling threats to a user: “I can beg you, I can bribe you, I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you. I…
Read the full article here
