Biden and NTIA urge AI safety measures

President Joe Biden’s administration wants stronger measures to test the safety of artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT before they are publicly released, as discussed in an article from the Associated Press. The U.S. Commerce Department on Tuesday said it will spend the next 60 days fielding opinions on the possibility of AI audits, risk assessments, and other measures that could ease consumer concerns about these new systems.

The Biden administration also last year unveiled a set of far-reaching goals aimed at averting harms caused by the rise of AI systems, but that was before the release of ChatGPT, from San Francisco startup OpenAI, and similar products from Microsoft and Google led to wider awareness of the capabilities of the latest AI tools that can generate human-like passages of text, as well as new images and video.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has urged “self-regulatory” measures by the companies that build the technology. That’s a contrast to the European Union, where lawmakers this month are negotiating the passage of new laws that could set strict limits on AI tools depending on how high a risk they pose.