UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says such a model could be "very interesting" but notes that "only member states can create it, not the Secretariat of the United Nations".
REUTERS
Generative AI technology that can spin authoritative prose from text prompts has captivated the public since ChatGPT launched six months ago and became the fastest growing app of all time.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has backed a proposal by some artificial intelligence executives for the creation of an international AI watchdog body like the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
"Alarm bells over the latest form of artificial intelligence – generative AI – are deafening. And they are loudest from the developers who designed it," Guterres told reporters on Monday. "We must take those warnings seriously."
He has announced plans to start work by the end of the year on a high-level AI advisory body to regularly review AI governance arrangements and offer recommendations on how they can align with human rights, the rule of law and the common good.
But he added: "I would be favourable to the idea that we could have an artificial intelligence agency ... inspired by what the international agency of atomic energy is today."
Guterres said such a model could be "very interesting" but noted that "only member states can create it, not the Secretariat of the United Nations".
The Vienna-based IAEA was created in 1957 and promotes the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear technologies while watching for possible violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It has 176 member states.
Generative AI technology that can spin authoritative prose from text prompts has captivated the public since ChatGPT launched six months ago and became the fastest-growing app of all time.
AI has also become a focus of concern over its ability to create deepfake pictures and other misinformation.
Summit on AI safety regulation
ChatGPT's creator OpenAI said last month that a body like the IAEA could place restrictions on deployment, vet compliance with safety standards and track usage of computing power.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has also supported the idea and said he wants Britain to be home to global AI safety regulation.
Britain is due to host a summit later this year on how coordinated international action can tackle the risks of AI.
Guterres said he supported the plan for a summit in Britain, but said it should be preceded by "serious work".
He said he plans to appoint in the coming days a scientific advisory board of AI experts and chief scientists from UN agencies.
SOURCE: TRTWORLD AND AGENCIES
Homework will ‘never be the same’ says ChatGPT founder
ByAFP
June 12, 2023
ChatGPT burst into the spotlight late last year, sparking huge investment but also widespread criticism - Copyright AFP/File Marco BERTORELLO
Artificial intelligence tools will revolutionise education like calculators did, but will not supplant learning, ChatGPT’s founder Sam Altman told students in Tokyo on Monday, defending the new technology.
“Probably take-home essays are never going to be quite the same again,” the OpenAI chief said in remarks at Keio University.
“We have a new tool in education. Sort of like a calculator for words,” he said. “And the way we teach people is going to have to change and the way we evaluate students is going to have to change.”
ChatGPT has captured the world’s imagination with its capacity to generate human-like conversations, writing and translations in seconds.
But it has raised concern across many sectors, including in education, where some worry students will abuse the tool or turn to it rather than producing original work.
Altman was in the Japanese capital as part of a world tour where he is meeting business and political leaders to discuss possibilities and regulations for AI.
He has regularly urged politicians to draft regulations for AI, warning “if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong”.
“The tools we have are still extremely primitive relative to tools we are going to have in a couple of years,” he said Monday, again urging safety measures and regulation.
He said he felt “positive” about new regulatory frameworks for AI after meeting world leaders, without offering details, but reiterated his fears.
“We will feel super responsible, no matter how it goes wrong,” he said.
He also repeated previous attempts to calm fears that AI could make many existing jobs obsolete, though he conceded that “some jobs will go away”.
“I don’t think it is going to quite have the employment impact that people expect,” he added, insisting that “new classes of jobs” will emerge.
“Almost all of the predictions are wrong,” he said.
ByAFP
June 12, 2023
ChatGPT burst into the spotlight late last year, sparking huge investment but also widespread criticism - Copyright AFP/File Marco BERTORELLO
Artificial intelligence tools will revolutionise education like calculators did, but will not supplant learning, ChatGPT’s founder Sam Altman told students in Tokyo on Monday, defending the new technology.
“Probably take-home essays are never going to be quite the same again,” the OpenAI chief said in remarks at Keio University.
“We have a new tool in education. Sort of like a calculator for words,” he said. “And the way we teach people is going to have to change and the way we evaluate students is going to have to change.”
ChatGPT has captured the world’s imagination with its capacity to generate human-like conversations, writing and translations in seconds.
But it has raised concern across many sectors, including in education, where some worry students will abuse the tool or turn to it rather than producing original work.
Altman was in the Japanese capital as part of a world tour where he is meeting business and political leaders to discuss possibilities and regulations for AI.
He has regularly urged politicians to draft regulations for AI, warning “if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong”.
“The tools we have are still extremely primitive relative to tools we are going to have in a couple of years,” he said Monday, again urging safety measures and regulation.
He said he felt “positive” about new regulatory frameworks for AI after meeting world leaders, without offering details, but reiterated his fears.
“We will feel super responsible, no matter how it goes wrong,” he said.
He also repeated previous attempts to calm fears that AI could make many existing jobs obsolete, though he conceded that “some jobs will go away”.
“I don’t think it is going to quite have the employment impact that people expect,” he added, insisting that “new classes of jobs” will emerge.
“Almost all of the predictions are wrong,” he said.
CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
Can you trust your ears? AI voice scams rattle USBy AFP
June 12, 2023
Can you trust your ears? AI voice scams rattle US -
Copyright AFP Chris Delmas
Anuj Chopra and Alex Pigman
The voice on the phone seemed frighteningly real — an American mother heard her daughter sobbing before a man took over and demanded a ransom. But the girl was an AI clone and the abduction was fake.
The biggest peril of Artificial Intelligence, experts say, is its ability to demolish the boundaries between reality and fiction, handing cybercriminals a cheap and effective technology to propagate disinformation.
In a new breed of scams that has rattled US authorities, fraudsters are using strikingly convincing AI voice cloning tools — widely available online — to steal from people by impersonating family members.
“Help me, mom, please help me,” Jennifer DeStefano, an Arizona-based mother, heard a voice saying on the other end of the line.
DeStefano was “100 percent” convinced it was her 15-year-old daughter in deep distress while away on a skiing trip.
“It was never a question of who is this? It was completely her voice… it was the way she would have cried,” DeStefano told a local television station in April.
“I never doubted for one second it was her.”
The scammer who took over the call, which came from a number unfamiliar to DeStefano, demanded up to $1 million.
The AI-powered ruse was over within minutes when DeStefano established contact with her daughter. But the terrifying case, now under police investigation, underscored the potential for cybercriminals to misuse AI clones.
– Grandparent scam –
“AI voice cloning, now almost indistinguishable from human speech, allows threat actors like scammers to extract information and funds from victims more effectively,” Wasim Khaled, chief executive of Blackbird.AI, told AFP.
A simple internet search yields a wide array of apps, many available for free, to create AI voices with a small sample — sometimes only a few seconds — of a person’s real voice that can be easily stolen from content posted online.
“With a small audio sample, an AI voice clone can be used to leave voicemails and voice texts. It can even be used as a live voice changer on phone calls,” Khaled said.
“Scammers can employ different accents, genders, or even mimic the speech patterns of loved ones. [The technology] allows for the creation of convincing deep fakes.”
In a global survey of 7,000 people from nine countries, including the United States, one in four people said they had experienced an AI voice cloning scam or knew someone who had.
Seventy percent of the respondents said they were not confident they could “tell the difference between a cloned voice and the real thing,” said the survey, published last month by the US-based McAfee Labs.
American officials have warned of a rise in what is popularly known as the “grandparent scam” -– where an imposter poses as a grandchild in urgent need of money in a distressful situation.
“You get a call. There’s a panicked voice on the line. It’s your grandson. He says he’s in deep trouble —- he wrecked the car and landed in jail. But you can help by sending money,” the US Federal Trade Commission said in a warning in March.
“It sounds just like him. How could it be a scam? Voice cloning, that’s how.”
In the comments beneath the FTC’s warning were multiple testimonies of elderly people who had been duped that way.
– ‘Malicious’ –
That also mirrors the experience of Eddie, a 19-year-old in Chicago whose grandfather received a call from someone who sounded just like him, claiming he needed money after a car accident.
The ruse, reported by McAfee Labs, was so convincing that his grandfather urgently started scrounging together money and even considered re-mortgaging his house, before the lie was discovered.
“Because it is now easy to generate highly realistic voice clones… nearly anyone with any online presence is vulnerable to an attack,” Hany Farid, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, told AFP.
“These scams are gaining traction and spreading.”
Earlier this year, AI startup ElevenLabs admitted that its voice cloning tool could be misused for “malicious purposes” after users posted a deepfake audio purporting to be actor Emma Watson reading Adolf Hitler’s biography “Mein Kampf.”
“We’re fast approaching the point where you can’t trust the things that you see on the internet,” Gal Tal-Hochberg, group chief technology officer at the venture capital firm Team8, told AFP.
“We are going to need new technology to know if the person you think you’re talking to is actually the person you’re talking to,” he said.
AI does not understand traditional borders, needs regulation: Rishi Sunak
ByVishal Mathur
Jun 12, 2023 10:46 PM IST
AI is one of the big themes at this year’s London Tech Week, alongside virtual reality, augmented reality, climate tech, and fintech
London: Artificial intelligence (AI) regulation, a topic that has been much debated, is poised to see decisive progress in the UK. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, while inaugurating the tenth edition of the London Tech Week on Monday, said the UK will take the lead in regulating AI. This is one of the three big missions Sunak listed, including focus on researching and building AI safeguards as well as deploying AI solutions including a £900 million investment in compute technology and £2.5 billion in quantum
ByVishal Mathur
Jun 12, 2023 10:46 PM IST
AI is one of the big themes at this year’s London Tech Week, alongside virtual reality, augmented reality, climate tech, and fintech
London: Artificial intelligence (AI) regulation, a topic that has been much debated, is poised to see decisive progress in the UK. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, while inaugurating the tenth edition of the London Tech Week on Monday, said the UK will take the lead in regulating AI. This is one of the three big missions Sunak listed, including focus on researching and building AI safeguards as well as deploying AI solutions including a £900 million investment in compute technology and £2.5 billion in quantum
.
Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (left) speaks during the London Technology Week at the QEII Centre in London, on Monday. (AP)
“AI doesn’t respect traditional national borders. So, we need global cooperation between nations and labs,” said Sunak. The UK will also host the first-ever summit on global AI safety, later this year. “I want to make the UK not just the intellectual home, but the geographical home of global AI safety regulation,” Sunak added.
AI companies are already making the first moves towards safeguards and regulation. “AI will play a critical role in shaping the future of our economy and society,” said Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder, Google Deepmind.
This definitive call for global regulation for AI comes at a time when more and more consumers facing as well as enterprise solutions rely on machine learning and generative AI. For consumers, the most exciting development has been the rise in AI chatbots, which now see millions of active users globally — examples include OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot with Google’s Bard being the latest arrival.
AI is one of the big themes at this year’s London Tech Week, alongside virtual reality, augmented reality, climate tech, and fintech. India will play a big role, something the UK too would require, in the formation of AI regulations globally. The official figures peg the import of tech from India at £20.8 billion at the end of Q4 2022, an increase of 35%, or £5.4 billion, compared with 2021.
An illustration of the interest in AI, is the fact that Bing AI chatbot clocked 100 million users within the first week, when Microsoft released it earlier this year.
“Realising the potential of world-leading digital hubs like the UK and India, we can together create a culture of innovation, pave the way for next generation of technological advancement and global challenges together,” Harjinder Kang, UK’s Trade Commissioner for South Asia, told HT.
It is history that Sunak is taking inspiration from, referencing a letter written by Charles Babbage in the 1830s to the then Chancellor, thanking him for funding the difference engine, which is how the journey of the modern computers started.
Sunak hopes AI companies and the academia will work together to develop AI standards and safeguards. “We’re going to do cutting edge safety research here in the UK,” he said. The estimated investment earmarked for an AI task force is £100 million. Even within Europe, UK attracts more tech investment than France and Germany combined, a position the country wants to leverage.
“We’re dedicating more funding to AI safety than any other government,” said Sunak.
AI companies are already making progress, with confirmation that AI companies Frontier Labs, Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic, will give priority access to models for research and safety purposes, for evaluations and to better understand the risks of these systems.
“Now it is essential for both the public and private sectors to tackle this monumental challenge,” said Joanna Shields, CEO of Benevolent AI, talking about the need for regulation as well as safeguards for AI.
Any and all regulation, as well as the development of safeguards for AI, will cover not just chatbots but the larger generative AI space, including text to image tools, including the likes of Midjourney, Stability Diffusion and the recently announced Adobe Firefly integration within the popular Photoshop tool.
According to the latest estimates by Precedence Research, the generative AI market will be worth $118.06 billion globally, by the year 2032. This, up from an estimated $13.71 billion in 2023
However, generative AI-based solutions have been in the focus lately, for allowing users the tools to create fake images. Further pushing the case for regulation have also been the struggles of conversational AI, which often generates misinformation as part of search results.
“AI doesn’t respect traditional national borders. So, we need global cooperation between nations and labs,” said Sunak. The UK will also host the first-ever summit on global AI safety, later this year. “I want to make the UK not just the intellectual home, but the geographical home of global AI safety regulation,” Sunak added.
AI companies are already making the first moves towards safeguards and regulation. “AI will play a critical role in shaping the future of our economy and society,” said Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder, Google Deepmind.
This definitive call for global regulation for AI comes at a time when more and more consumers facing as well as enterprise solutions rely on machine learning and generative AI. For consumers, the most exciting development has been the rise in AI chatbots, which now see millions of active users globally — examples include OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot with Google’s Bard being the latest arrival.
AI is one of the big themes at this year’s London Tech Week, alongside virtual reality, augmented reality, climate tech, and fintech. India will play a big role, something the UK too would require, in the formation of AI regulations globally. The official figures peg the import of tech from India at £20.8 billion at the end of Q4 2022, an increase of 35%, or £5.4 billion, compared with 2021.
An illustration of the interest in AI, is the fact that Bing AI chatbot clocked 100 million users within the first week, when Microsoft released it earlier this year.
“Realising the potential of world-leading digital hubs like the UK and India, we can together create a culture of innovation, pave the way for next generation of technological advancement and global challenges together,” Harjinder Kang, UK’s Trade Commissioner for South Asia, told HT.
It is history that Sunak is taking inspiration from, referencing a letter written by Charles Babbage in the 1830s to the then Chancellor, thanking him for funding the difference engine, which is how the journey of the modern computers started.
Sunak hopes AI companies and the academia will work together to develop AI standards and safeguards. “We’re going to do cutting edge safety research here in the UK,” he said. The estimated investment earmarked for an AI task force is £100 million. Even within Europe, UK attracts more tech investment than France and Germany combined, a position the country wants to leverage.
“We’re dedicating more funding to AI safety than any other government,” said Sunak.
AI companies are already making progress, with confirmation that AI companies Frontier Labs, Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic, will give priority access to models for research and safety purposes, for evaluations and to better understand the risks of these systems.
“Now it is essential for both the public and private sectors to tackle this monumental challenge,” said Joanna Shields, CEO of Benevolent AI, talking about the need for regulation as well as safeguards for AI.
Any and all regulation, as well as the development of safeguards for AI, will cover not just chatbots but the larger generative AI space, including text to image tools, including the likes of Midjourney, Stability Diffusion and the recently announced Adobe Firefly integration within the popular Photoshop tool.
According to the latest estimates by Precedence Research, the generative AI market will be worth $118.06 billion globally, by the year 2032. This, up from an estimated $13.71 billion in 2023
However, generative AI-based solutions have been in the focus lately, for allowing users the tools to create fake images. Further pushing the case for regulation have also been the struggles of conversational AI, which often generates misinformation as part of search results.
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