The title of this article is “This was the OMG moment I realized it may already be too late to regulate AI” and it dived into the issues surrounding the rapid development of AI and the worry about regulating the newfound technology. With AI being recently used to generate voices and messages from US Senate hearings such as this one, it became an “OMG” moment when Senator Richard Blumenthal started the hearing with a prerecorded speech made using AI voice cloning software. This sparked a conversation among the Senators about the risks of unregulated AI, the manipulation of people through chatbots, and the potential to end up in the same situation as social media. As a result, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman proposed the need for a regulatory body and global guidelines for AI with the advantages and disadvantages being discussed.
OpenAI is an AI research lab whose mission is to ensure that AI is used responsibly and to promote the safe and ethical use of AI technology. They have set up safeguards and trained their AI models for six months before releasing them for public use. Sam Altman, the current CEO, believes that governmental intervention is necessary for mitigating the risks of these more powerful models. The senators also suggested AI Nutrition labels to explain how and why generative AI works and to make the origin of AI content more transparent.
Unfortunately, it may already be too late to catch up with all of the regulation, especially with the upcoming US Presidential election. The open-ended question is whether or not AI regulation can be achieved before it is too late and whether the balance between the risks and benefits of AI can be achieved.
