philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Generative AI: a game-changer that society and industry need to be ready for

... Besides profound effects on tasks and jobs, generative AI models and associated externalities have raised alarm in the AI governance community. One of the problems with large language models is their ability to generate false and misleading content. Meta’s Galactica – a model trained on 48 million science articles with claims to summarize academic papers, solve math problems, and write scientific code – was taken down after less than three days of being online as the scientific community found it was producing incorrect results after misconstruing scientific facts and knowledge.

This is even more alarming when seen in the context of automated troll bots, with capabilities advanced enough to render obsolete, The Turing Test – which tests a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour similar to or indistinguishable from a human. Such capabilities can be misused to generate fake news and disinformation across platforms and ecosystems.

How is generative AI governed?

In the private sector, two approaches to the governance of generative AI models are currently emerging. In one camp, companies such as OpenAI are self-governing the space through limited release strategies, monitored use of models, and controlled access via API’s for their commercial products like DALL-E2. In the other camp, newer organizations, such as Stability AI, believe that these models should be openly released to democratize access and create the greatest possible impact on society and the economy. Stability AI open sourced the weights of its model – as a result, developers can essentially plug it into everything to create a host of novel visual effects with little or no controls placed on the diffusion process. ...

This is a task not only reserved for private companies, but which is equally important for civil society and for policymakers to weigh in on. This includes disruption of labour markets, legitimacy of scraped data, licensing, copyright and potential for biased or otherwise harmful content, misinformation, and so on. Only when solid checks and balances are in place can more thoughtful and beneficial expansion of generative AI technologies and products be achieved.

See the full story here: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/01/davos23-generative-ai-a-game-changer-industries-and-society-code-developers/