Experts grow concerned about potential misuse of artificial intelligence

MIAMI – Amid the expansion of artificial intelligence applications for military and civilian use, more experts are growing concerned about the possible misuse of the technology.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology released a 48-page manual on Wednesday about the risk management of AI after a congressional direction related to national defense.

In the United Kingdom, Michael Osborne, a professor of machine learning at the University of Oxford, warned The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee about the dangers, The Times of London reported.

“I think we’re in a massive AI arms race, geopolitically with the US versus China, and among tech firms there seems to be this willingness to throw safety and caution out the window and race as fast as possible to the most advanced AI,” Osborne said while asking legislators to regulate it like a nuclear arm.

The warning comes after Samuel H. Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI, recently told StrictlyVC’s Connie Loizos about his concerns with the misuse of AI.

“The bad case, and I think this is important to say, is, like, lights out for all of us,” Altman said. “I’m more worried about an accidental misuse case in the short term.”

OpenAI, a research lab based in San Francisco that has had the support of Elon Musk, developed Five, which learned by playing over 10,000 years of games against itself, and Codex, which generates code.

OpenAI also released the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, or GPT-3, which produces human-like text, in 2020, and modified to develop DALL-E and DALL-E2, which generates digital images from natural language descriptions, in 2021, and ChatGPT, a chatbot, in 2022.

There has also been an expansion in AI education. The University of Texas at Austin announced Thursday the development of a new online master of science degree in the rapidly expanding field of artificial intelligence and open applications in June to start in 2024.

Media companies are looking into the uses. BuzzFeed announced Thursday that it will adopt ChatGPT to create more “AI inspired” digital content such as quizzes and interactive features. CNET also used ChatGPT, but there were errors.