The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman testified at a Senate hearing on Tuesday, May 16, 2023. The head of the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT disclosed during the hearing that government intervention “will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful” AI systems.
“As this technology advances, we understand that people are anxious about how it could change the way we live. We are too,” Altman said.
Altman proposed the formation of a U.S. or global agency that would license the most powerful AI systems and have the authority to “take that license away and ensure compliance with safety standards.”
Altman’s company caught public attention after it released ChatGPT late last year. ChatGPT is a free chatbot tool that answers questions with convincingly human-like responses.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who acts as Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law, opened the hearing with a recorded speech that sounded like himself, but was actually a voice clone trained on Blumenthal’s floor speeches and reciting a speech written by ChatGPT after he asked the chatbot to compose his opening remarks.
Blumenthal said that the result was impressive. However, he added, “What if I had asked it, and what if it had provided, an endorsement of Ukraine surrendering or (Russian President) Vladimir Putin’s leadership?”
Blumenthal stated that AI companies need to be mandated to test their systems and disclose known risks before releasing them, and expressed particular concern about how future AI systems could destabilize the job market.
Asked about what his biggest nightmare regarding AI developments would be, Altman remarked that “he expects there to be significant impact on jobs, but exactly what that impact will be is hard to predict”. He stated that it is important to think about GPT-4 “as a tool, not a creature.”
“It’s a tool that people have a great deal of control,” on how they use it. The OpenAI CEO noted that it is a tool for tasks, rather than jobs.
Looking back through the history of technology, Altman noted that as technology grows, our quality of life raises as well. He added that “he is very optimistic about how great the jobs in the future will be”.
A Critical First Step
The panel’s ranking Republican, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, opined that “Artificial intelligence will be transformative in ways we can’t even imagine, with implications for Americans’ elections, jobs, and security.” He added, “This hearing marks a critical first step towards understanding what Congress should do.”
IBM’s Chief Privacy and Trust Officer, Christina Montgomery, and Gary Marcus, a Professor Emeritus at New York University also testified at the Senate hearing.
Gary Marcus told the committee that he believed the best way to regulate AI would be to create a new government agency altogether. “My view is we probably need a cabinet-level organisation within the US to address this,” he opined.
However, Christina Montgomery, IBM’s Chief Privacy and Trust Officer, disagreed.
“We don’t want to slow down regulation to address real risks right now. We have existing regulatory authorities in place who have been clear that they have the ability to regulate in their respective domains.”
Christina Montgomery
Democratic Senator, Chris Coons responded that these organisations were not funded well enough to do this.
Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has taken the perhaps unusual stance of agreeing that regulation is required, and called on US Senators to regulate artificial intelligence.
“We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigating the risks of increasingly powerful (AI) models,” he said.
A number of tech industry leaders have disclosed that they welcome some form of AI oversight but have cautioned against what they see as overly heavy-handed rules.
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