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OpenAI Does Not Believe General AI is a Real Threat [1]
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Date: 2023-06-22
OpenAI has talked a big game about the dangers of AI coming to kill us all, but when the opportunity for meaningful regulations was presented to them, they fought to escape it:
Prior to its approval, lawmakers debated expanding terms within the AI Act to designate all general-purpose AI systems (GPAIs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E as “high risk” under the act’s risk categorizations. Doing so would hold them to the most stringent safety and transparency obligations. According to Time, OpenAI repeatedly fought against the company’s generative AI systems falling under this designation in 2022, arguing that only companies explicitly applying AI to high-risk use cases should be made to comply with the regulations. This argument has also been pushed by Google and Microsoft, which have similarly lobbied the EU to reduce the AI Act’s impact on companies building GPAIs. OpenAI lobbied the EU to avoid stricter regulations for its AI models - The Verge
I have talked about this before, but OpenAI and companies like it cannot be considered serious when they discuss the alleged risks of general AI. They talk about the potential for the destruction of humanity in the far future as a distraction from the real problems of AI in the here and now. AI is used to discriminate against people in housing, prison sentencing, and hiring. AI models are trained on the artistic output of millions of people without permission or recompense. Those are real problems the EU legislation is meant to address. And so OpenAI opposed them.
There is nothing surprising here, no grand revelation. OpenAI is merely a company, attempting to privatize their gains and socialize their losses and costs, like too many other companies. The lesson, as always, is that companies cannot be trusted when it comes to regulation.
They won't self-regulate, they won't help us minimize the externalities their business practices generate, and they will not look out for the greater good. They will attempt to extract as much value out of society for themselves while pushing as much of the cost of that extraction back onto the rest of us. Any industry that can impose costs on society must be democratically controlled.
Because otherwise they promise to save us from the future while working to harm us in the present.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/22/2176800/-OpenAI-Does-Not-Believe-General-AI-is-a-Real-Threat
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