By Ryan Morrison, Tech Monitor
General purpose artificial intelligence tools will provide new challenges for regulators, which they may struggle to meet. “AI will fundamentally change every software category” said Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella Tuesday when he announced OpenAI’s generative AI technology was coming to the Bing search engine to offer users what MSFT hopes will be a richer search experience.
But how to regulate tools, such as OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, that can generate any type of content from a few words, and are trained on the world’s knowledge, is a question that is puzzling policymakers around the world. The solution will involve assessing risk, one expert told Tech Monitor, and certain types of content will need to be more closely monitored than others.
Within two months of launch, ChatGPT, the AI chatbot became the fastest-growing consumer product in history, with more than 100 million active monthly users in January alone. It has prompted some of the world’s largest companies to pivot to or speed up AI rollout plans and has given a new lease of life to the conversational AI sector.
Microsoft is embedding conversational AI in its browser, search engine and broader product range, while Google is planning to do the same with the chatbot Bard and other integrations into Gmail and Google Cloud, several of which it showcased at an event in Paris today.
Other tech giants such as China’s Baidu are also getting in on the act with chatbots of their own, and start-ups and smaller companies including Jasper and Quora bringing generative and conversational AI to the mainstream consumer and enterprise markets.
This comes with real risks from widespread misinformation and harder-to-spot phishing emails through to misdiagnosis and malpractice if used for medical information. There is also a high risk of bias if the data used to feed the model isn’t diverse. While Microsoft has a retrained model that is more accurate, and other providers like AI21 are working on verifying generated content against live data, the risk of “real looking but completely inaccurate” responses from generative AI are still high.
