The accelerating development of artificial intelligence technologies may already be disrupting democratic processes such as elections and could even threaten human existence, AI experts warned at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York.
The explosion of generative AI — which can create text, photos and videos in response to open-ended requests — in recent months has sparked both excitement about its potential and fears that it could make some jobs obsolete, undermine elections and even possibly take over humans.
“The biggest immediate risk is the threat to democracy… there are a lot of elections around the world in 2024, and the likelihood of any of them being undermined by deep fakes and things like that is almost zero,” said Gary Marcus, a professor at New York University , in a panel at the Reuters NEXT conference, in New York, this Wednesday.
A major concern is that generative AI has fueled so-called “deepfakes” — realistic but fabricated videos created by AI algorithms trained on copious online images — that emerge on social media, confusing fact and fiction in politics.
Although this type of synthetic media has been around for several years, what used to cost millions can now cost around $300, Marcus said.
Companies are increasingly using AI to make decisions, including about pricing, which can lead to discriminatory results, experts warned at the conference.
Marta Tellado, CEO of the nonprofit Consumer Reports, said an investigation found that car owners living in neighborhoods with a majority black or brown population, and near a neighborhood with mostly white residents, pay auto insurance premiums up to 30% bigger.
“There is no transparency for the consumer at all,” she said during a panel interview.
Another emerging threat that lawmakers and technology company leaders must guard against is the possibility of AI becoming so powerful that it poses a threat to humanity, said Anthony Aguirre, founder and executive director of the Future of Life Institute, in an interview at the conference.
“We should not underestimate how powerful these models are now and how quickly they will become more powerful,” he said.
The Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit that aims to reduce the catastrophic risks of advanced artificial intelligence, made headlines in March when it released an open letter calling for a six-month pause in training AI systems more powerful than GPT- 4 from OpenAI.
The organization warned that AI labs are “trapped in a headlong race” to develop “powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can reliably understand, predict, or control.”
The development of increasingly powerful AI could also risk eliminating jobs, to the point where it could be impossible for humans to simply learn new skills and enter other sectors.
By Anna Tong in San Francisco