US President Joe Biden met with the CEOs of leading artificial intelligence companies, including Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google, and emphasised the importance of ensuring the safety of their products before they are deployed.

This year’s buzzword has been generative artificial intelligence, with apps like ChatGPT attracting the public’s attention, triggering a rush among corporations to build comparable products they believe would revolutionise the nature of work.

Millions of people have begun testing such tools, which supporters claim can perform medical diagnoses, write screenplays, draught legal briefs, and debug software, raising concerns about how the technology could lead to privacy violations, skew employment decisions, and power scams and misinformation campaigns.

According to the White House, Biden, who has used and experimented with ChatGPT, reminded the officials that they must reduce the existing and potential hazards AI poses to individuals, society, and national security.

According to the White House, the meeting included a “frank and constructive discussion” about the need for firms to be more honest with policymakers about their AI systems, the necessity of reviewing the safety of such products, and the need to secure them against malicious assaults.

Google’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft Corp’s Satya Nadella, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei joined Vice President Kamala Harris and administration officials including Biden’s Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Director of the National Economic Council Lael Brainard, and Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo for the two-hour meeting, which began at 11:45 a.m. ET.

In a statement, Harris stated that while technology has the ability to benefit lives, it may also pose safety, privacy, and civil rights concerns. She informed the CEOs that companies have a “legal responsibility” to safeguard the safety of their artificial intelligence technologies, and that the government is open to adopting new laws and supporting new artificial intelligence legislation.

In answer to a reporter’s query about whether firms are on the same page regarding rules, Altman said after the discussion, “we’re surprisingly on the same page about what needs to happen.”

The administration also announced a $140 million National Science Foundation investment in seven new AI research institutions, as well as the publishing of policy guidance on the federal government’s use of AI by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

Leading AI developers will engage in a public examination of their AI systems, including Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, NVIDIA Corp, OpenAI, and Stability AI.

Shortly after Biden declared his reelection campaign, the Republican National Committee released a film depicting a nightmarish future during a second Biden term that was totally constructed with AI graphics.

As AI technology advances, such political advertisements are projected to become more widespread.

The aggressive approach used by European governments on tech regulation and in creating strong laws on deepfakes and misinformation by US authorities has fallen short.

“We don’t see this as a race,” a senior administration official said, adding that the administration is working closely with the U.S.-EU Trade & Technology Council on the issue.

Biden signed an executive order in February requiring federal agencies to prevent bias in AI deployment. In addition, the Biden administration has issued an AI Bill of Rights and a risk management framework.

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division both said last week that they would utilise their legal powers to combat AI-related harm.

Many times, tech titans have committed to battle political propaganda, misleading news regarding COVID-19 vaccines, pornography and child exploitation, and hostile speech targeting ethnic groups. However, research and news occurrences demonstrate that they have been ineffective.

(Adapted from BusinessToday.in)

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