Governments Across the Globe Mulls AI Regulation

In a recent announcement, Australia revealed its plans to regulate AI, with a focus on addressing concerns related to deep fakes and deceptive content. The government is considering the implementation of measures, including a potential ban, to prevent the misuse of AI technology that can generate realistic yet false content.

“There is clearly, in the community, a concern about whether or not the technology is getting ahead of itself,” Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic told ABC television.

Similarly, according to reports, top leaders in China including Xi Jinping, the paramount leader of China, have called for greater state oversight of the technology. The Chinese believe AI could pose a significant threat to national security.Top officials in China met recently to discuss improving the security governance of internet data and AI.

Last month, US President Joe Biden met with the CEOs of some of the biggest companies working in AI to discuss the threat posed by the technology. Biden met with Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, Sam Altman, CEO at OpenAI and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.

At the same time, legislators in Europe urged US President Joe Biden to convene a global summit aimed at addressing the need for control and regulation of AI development.

In India too, the government has confirmed that the upcoming Digital India Act (DIA) will have provisions to deal with AI generated disinformation. “We are not going to regulate AI but we will create guardrails. There will be no separate legislation but a part of DIA will address threats related to high-risk AI,” Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said.

AI threats

AI does pose significant risks, both in the short and long run. Deep fakes are getting better and better and AI text-to-image models like DALL-E2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion can now create hyper-realistic images.

Earlier this year, photos of Former US President Donald Trump being arrested went viral on Twitter.

While with the advent of LLMs, there is also a growing risk of automation and job losses. Further, AI could become a tool for disinformation. However, will AI lead to human extinction?

Recently, top AI experts have sounded the alarm claiming AI could potentially lead to human extinction. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” a statement by them reads.

Notable signatories include Turing Award recipients Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, as well as Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind.

However, not everyone agrees to such statements. Few experts in the field believe AI in its current stage does not pose such capabilities. Additionally, a few also believe it’s a form of fear mongering which is actually detrimental for society.

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