ChatGPT's Altman pleads to US Senate for AI r8k8 comules

WASHINGTON - Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT's OpenAI, told US lawmakers on Tuesday that regulating artificial intelligence was essential, after his chatbot stunned the world.

The lawmakers stressed their deepest fears of AI's developments, with a leading senator opening the hearing on Capitol Hill with a computer-made voice, sounding remarkably similar to his own, reading a text generated by the bot.

"If you were listening from home, you might have thought that voice was mine and the words from me, but in fact, that voice was not mine," said Senator Richard Blumenthal.

Artificial intelligence technologies "are more than just research experiments. They are no longer fantasies of science fiction, they are real and present," Blumenthal said.

The latest figure to erupt from Silicon Valley, Altman testified before a US Senate subcommittee and urged Congress to impose new rules on big tech, despite deep political divisions that for years have blocked legislation aimed at regulating the internet.

But governments worldwide are under pressure to move quickly after the release of ChatGPT, a bot that can churn out human-like content in an instant, went viral and both wowed and spooked users.

Altman has since become the global face of AI as he both pushes out his company's technology, including to Microsoft and scores of companies, and warns that the work could have nefarious effects on society.

"OpenAI was founded on the belief that artificial intelligence has the potential to improve nearly every aspect of our lives, but also that it creates serious risks," Altman told a Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing.

He insisted that in time, generative AI developed by OpenAI will "address some of humanity's biggest challenges, like climate change and curing cancer."

However, given the risk to disinformation, jobs and other problems, "we think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models," he said.

AFP