WASHINGTON, March 22, 2023 — Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., on Tuesday urged the companies behind generative artificial intelligence products to anticipate and mitigate the potential harms that AI-powered chatbots pose to underage users.

“The race to deploy generative AI cannot come at the expense of our children,” Bennet wrote in a letter to the heads of Google, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft and Snap. “Responsible deployment requires clear policies and frameworks to promote safety, anticipate risk and mitigate harm.”

In response to the explosive popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, several leading tech companies have rushed to integrate their own AI-powered applications. Microsoft recently released an AI-powered version of its Bing search engine, and Google has announced plans to make a conversational AI service “widely available to the public in the coming weeks.”

Social media platforms have followed suit, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying the company plans to “turbocharge” its AI development the same day Snapchat launched a GPT-powered chatbot called My AI.

These chatbots have already demonstrated “alarming” interactions, Bennet wrote. In response to a researcher posing as a child, My AI gave instructions for lying to parents about an upcoming trip with a 31-year-old man and for covering up a bruise ahead of a visit from Child Protective Services.

A Snap Newsroom post announcing the chatbot acknowledged that “as with all AI-powered chatbots, My AI is prone to hallucination and can be tricked into saying just about anything.”

Bennet criticized the company for deploying My AI despite knowledge of its shortcomings, noting that 59 percent of teens aged 13 to 17 use Snapchat. “Younger users are at an earlier stage of cognitive, emotional, and intellectual development, making them more impressionable, impulsive, and less equipped to distinguish fact from fiction,” he wrote.

These concerns are compounded by an escalating youth mental health crisis, Bennet added. In 2021, more than half of teen girls reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless and one in three seriously contemplated suicide, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Against this backdrop, it is not difficult to see the risk of exposing young people to chatbots that have at times engaged in verbal abuse, encouraged deception and suggested self-harm,” the senator wrote.

Bennet’s letter comes as lawmakers from both parties are expressing growing concerns about technology’s impact on young users. Legislation aimed at safeguarding children’s online privacy has gained broad bipartisan support, and several other measures — ranging from a minimum age requirement for social media usage to a slew of regulations for tech companies — have been proposed.

Many industry experts have also called for increased AI regulation, noting that very little legislation currently governs the powerful technology.

WASHINGTON, March 14, 2023 –  In response to lawmakers’ concerns over the impacts on certain artificial intelligence technologies, experts said at an oversight subcommittee hearing on Wednesday that more government regulation would be necessary to stem their negative impacts.

Relatively new machine learning technology known as generative AI, which is designed to create content on its own, has taken the world by storm. Specific applications such as the recently surfaced ChatGPT, which can write out entire novels from basic user inputs, has drawn both marvel and concern.

Such AI technology can be used to encourage cheating behaviors in academia as well as harm people through the use of  deep fakes, which uses AI to superimpose a user in a video. Such AI can be used to produce “revenge pornography” to harass, silence and blackmail victims.

Aleksander Mądry, professor of Cadence Design Systems of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the subcommittee that AI is a very fast moving technology, meaning the government needs to step in to confirm the objectives of the companies and whether the algorithms match the societal benefits and values. These generative AI technologies are often limited to their human programming and can also display biases.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, raised concerns about this type of AI replacing human jobs. Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and now chair of the AI development initiative known as the Special Competitive Studies Project, said that if this AI can be well-directed, it can aid people in obtaining higher incomes and actually creating more jobs.

To that point, Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Massachusetts., raised the question of how much progress the government has made or still needs in AI development.

Schmidt said governments across the country need to look at bolstering the labor force to keep up.

“I just don’t see the progress in government to reform the way of hiring and promoting technical people,” he said. “This technology is too new. You need new students, new ideas, new invention – I think that’s the fastest way.

“On the federal level, the easiest thing to do is to come up with some program that’s ministered by the state or by leading universities and getting them money so that they can build these programs.”

Schmidt urged lawmakers last year to create a digital service academy to train more young American students on AI, cybersecurity and cryptocurrency, reported Axios.

WASHINGTON, February 3, 2023 — Just two months after its viral launch, ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly users in January, reportedly making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history — and raising concerns, both internal and external, about the lack of regulation for generative artificial intelligence.

Many of the potential problems with generative AI models stem from the datasets used to train them. The models will reflect whatever biases, inaccuracies and otherwise harmful content was present in their training data, but too much dataset filtering can detract from performance.

OpenAI has grappled with these concerns for years while developing powerful, publicly available tools such as DALL·E — an AI system that generates realistic images and original art from text descriptions, said Anna Makanju, OpenAI’s head of public policy, a Federal Communications Bar Association event on Friday.

“We knew right off the bat that nonconsensual sexual imagery was going to be a problem, so we thought, ‘Why don’t we just try to go through the dataset and remove any sexual imagery so people can’t generate it,’” Makanju said. “And when we did that, the model could no longer generate women, because it turns out most of the visual images that are available to train a dataset on women are sexual in nature.”

Despite rigorous testing before ChatGPT’s release, early users quickly discovered ways to evade some of the guardrails intended to prevent harmful uses.

The model would not generate offensive content in response to direct requests, but one user found a loophole by asking it to write from the perspective of someone holding racist views — resulting in several paragraphs of explicitly racist text. When some users asked ChatGPT to write code using race and gender to determine whether someone would be a good scientist, the bot replied with a function that only selected white men. Still others were able to use the tool to generate phishing emails and malicious code.

OpenAI quickly responded with adjustments to the model’s filtering algorithms, as well as increased monitoring.

“So far, the approach we’ve taken is we just try to stay away from areas that can be controversial, and we ask the model not to speak to those areas,” Makanju said.

The company has also attempted to limit certain high-impact uses, such as automated hiring. “We don’t feel like at this point we know enough about how our systems function and biases that may impact employment, or if there’s enough accuracy for there to be an automated decision about hiring without a human in the loop,” Makanju explained.

However, Makanju noted that future generative language models will likely reach a point where users can significantly customize them based on personal worldviews. At that point, strong guardrails will need to be in place to prevent the model from behaving in certain harmful ways — for example, encouraging self-harm or giving incorrect medical advice.

Those guardrails should probably be established by external bodies or government agencies, Makanju said. “We recognize that we — a pretty small company in Silicon Valley — are not the best place to make a decision of how this will be used in every single domain, as hard as we try to think about it.”

Little AI regulation currently exists

So far, the U.S. has very little legislation governing the use of AI, although some states regulate automated hiring tools. On Jan. 26, the National Institute of Standards and Technology released the first version of its voluntary AI risk management framework, developed at the direction of Congress.

This regulatory crawl is being rapidly outpaced by the speed of generative AI research. Google reportedly declared a “code red” in response to ChatGPT’s release, speeding the development of multiple AI tools. Chinese tech company Baidu is planning to launch its own AI chatbot in March.

Not every company will respond to harmful uses as quickly as OpenAI, and some may not even attempt to stop them, said Claire Leibowicz, head of AI and media integrity at the Partnership on AI. PAI is a nonprofit coalition that develops tools recommendations for AI governance.

Various private organizations, including PAI, have laid out their own ethical frameworks and policy recommendations. There is ongoing discussion about the extent to which these organizations, government agencies and tech companies should be determining AI regulation, Leibowicz said.

“What I’m interested in is, who’s involved in that risk calculus?” she asked. “How are we making those decisions? What types of actual affected communities are we talking to in order to make that calculus? Or is it a group of engineers sitting in a room trying to forecast for the whole world?”

Leibowicz advocated for transparency measures such as requiring standardized “nutrition labels” that would disclose the training dataset for any given AI model — a proposal similar to the label mandate announced in November for internet service providers.

A regulatory framework should be implemented while these technologies are still being created, rather than in response to a future crisis, Makanju said. “It’s very clear that this technology is going to be incorporated into every industry in some way in the coming years, and I worry a little bit about where we are right now in getting there.”