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Journalism of Courage
With tools like ChatGPT and Bing Image Creator going mainstream, people are finding new and innovative ways to implement them in their workflows every day. But not all is roses. Microsoft Chief Economist Michael Schwarz has asserted that artificial intelligence will be dangerous in the hands of unscrupulous people.
“I am confident AI will be used by bad actors, and yes it will cause real damage,” Schwarz said at the World Economic Forum panel in Geneva on Wednesday. He added that in the hands of spammers, it can do a lot of damage to elections and other matters of public interest. AI must be regulated, he cautioned, but only after the technology causes “real harm.”
“Once we see real harm, we have to ask ourselves the simple question: ‘Can we regulate that in a way where the good things that will be prevented by this regulation are less important?” Schwarz said. “The principles should be, the benefits from the regulation to our society should be greater than the cost to our society.”
Microsoft is currently heavily invested in AI and has already added generative AI technology to its search engine and other products. Schwarz said that the company is implementing measures to help prevent AI from going off the guardrails. However, he also warned that policymakers should be careful not to directly regulate AI training sets as that would be “pretty disastrous.”
AI tools like ChatGPT have come under increased scrutiny recently, with policymakers and governments trying to regulate generative AI. In late March, The Italian Data Protection Authority even banned ChatGPT due to concerns over the illegal collection of personal data and the lack of guardrails to prevent minors from using the chatbot. The ban was reversed more recently, though, as OpenAI gave in to demands by the body.
On Thursday, US Vice President Kamala Harris will meet with the CEOs of Microsoft, Alphabet and OpenAI to explore how to mitigate the potential dangers of AI technologies.
But despite the risks, Schwarz remains confident that AI will revolutionise the way most businesses operate, even though that may take time.
“I like to say AI changes nothing in the short run and it changes everything in the long run,” Schwarz said. “That is true for every single technology that came before.”
