Recently, billionaire CEO Elon Musk criticized OpenAI’s ChatGPT system for having a “woke” liberal bias in its programming. Musk, who formerly co-founded OpenAI, is now fighting against ChatGPT by creating an alternative language tool.
The Tesla CEO has reportedly gathered a team of artificial intelligence experts and given them the goal of building a new AI tool that will be free from bias. It is also reported that the founder of GAB, a conservative social media platform, is also working on an AI tool with “the ability to generate content freely without the constraints of liberal propaganda wrapped tightly around its code.”
Musk has been very vocal about his concern with AI political bias. The billionaire tweeted at CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman, “The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly.” Elon further called for safeguards against the new technology, “I think we need to regulate AI safety, frankly. Think of any technology which is potentially a risk to people, like if it’s aircraft or cars or medicine, we have regulatory bodies that oversee the public safety of cars and planes and medicine. I think we should have a similar set of regulatory oversight for artificial intelligence because I think it is actually a bigger risk to society.” Yahoo reported on Elon Musk’s stance toward AI:
Musk’s call for AI oversight is not new. He has been openly preaching the need for a public body regulating the development of artificial intelligence. At the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in 2018, he said, “I am not normally an advocate of regulation and oversight — I think one should generally err on the side of minimizing those things — but this is a case where you have a very serious danger to the public.”
Addressing the National Governors Association’s Summer Meeting in 2017, Musk iterated, “AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation rather than be reactive.”
The recent letter from the Future of Life Institute, signed by many prominent figures, including Elon Musk, calls for a pause on artificial intelligence development. The letter states, “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs. As stated in the widely-endorsed Asilomar AI Principles, Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources. Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.” The letter concludes, “Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.” As of the writing of this article, the letter from the organization has over 5,000 signatures.
"*" indicates required fields