Seven of the leading companies at the forefront of the revolution in artificial intelligence (AI) have agreed to impose voluntary safeguards on their development of the technology, according to an announcement from the White House on Friday.
According to an announcement by President Biden after meeting with executives from the companies, Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI, have all agreed to “voluntary commitments for responsible innovation” which will focus on three basic principles of “safety, security and trust,”
The development of generative AI tools with the ability to create unique text or images using simple user prompts, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot and DALL-E 2 image generator, have sparked a race among major tech firms, which are seeking to utilize similar technologies in their own products and advance the technology with their own research projects as the field begins to advance at an accelerating rate.
Analysts note that AI has the potential to disrupt entire industries and redesign the entire job market. The powerful nature of the technology has also sparked fears of AI’s, given control over various aspects of business and society perhaps acting in ways which are unpredictable and potentially harmful to humans, given they will be imbued with rulesets which they may modify, or interpret in light of new information, in unpredictable ways. This has led lawmakers to call for more federal regulations to control the development and application of the technology.
In his Friday announcement, Biden revealed several steps the companies involved have agreed to take.
The first step agreed to, was to test the capabilities of their systems, assess their potential risks, and make the results of these tests public. Second, they will also look to establish safeguards against cyber threats and manage any potential risks to national security.
Third, the companies have agreed that they “have a duty to earn the people’s trust and empower users to make informed decisions, labeling content that has been altered or AI-generated, rooting out bias and discrimination, strengthening privacy protections and shielding children from harm.”
Finally the companies, “have agreed to find ways for AI to help meet society’s greatest challenges, from cancer to climate change.”
Advocates for more government regulation of the industry said the agreement was a good start, however they felt there should still be more regulations placed upon the industry to safeguard the public.
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said, “These commitments are a step in the right direction, but, as I have said before, we need more than industry commitments. We also need some degree of regulation.”
John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council said in an interview with MSNBC that the administration is drafting an executive order, and will look to pass legislation which will offer guidance on further innovation.
