Top government officials recently met with leading tech executives, including the Alphabet and Microsoft CEOs, to discuss advancements in AI and Washington’s involvement. However, the development of generative AI models like ChatGPT and Bard has raised concerns among experts. Malicious actors representing the world’s most successful hacking groups and aggressive nation-states are building their own generative AI replicas. These actors will not stop for anything, and this is a cause for concern.
Generative AI has the potential to transform various industries, including technology, medicine, education, and agriculture, among others. However, there are concerns that AI may cause mass layoffs. In movies like The Terminator, the fictional effects of a runaway AI provide plenty of precedent for fear. This fear fuels more realistic concerns about AI-induced mass layoffs.
Despite the potential negative effects of AI, America cannot afford to pause AI development. A private or government-ordered pause will cripple the country’s ability to defend individuals and businesses from enemies. AI development happens quickly, and any delay that regulators put on that development would set America back exponentially in comparison to its adversaries who are also developing their own AI.
Regulators are not used to moving at the speed that AI necessitates. Even if they were, there is no guarantee that it would make a difference in how America is able to use AI to defend itself from adversaries. Criminals pushing dangerous, illicit substances do not follow the rules created to regulate and penalize the recreational drug trade in America. The same behavior will occur among America’s geopolitical rivals, who will disregard any attempt the country makes to place guardrails around AI development.
The AI Arms Race
In the past eight months, hackers have claimed to be developing or investing heavily in artificial intelligence. Researchers have already confirmed that attackers could enable OpenAI’s tools to aid them in hacking. How effective these methods are currently and how advanced other nations’ AI tools are does not matter as long as we know that they are developing them. These attackers and nations will certainly use them for malicious purposes.
In cybersecurity, our ability to create tools to thwart attackers’ exploits and scams has always been referred to as an arms race. However, with AI as advanced as GPT-4 in the picture, the arms race has gone nuclear. Malicious actors can use artificial intelligence to find vulnerabilities and entry points and generate phishing messages that take information from public company emails, LinkedIn, and organizational charts, rendering them nearly identical to real emails or text messages.
On the other hand, cybersecurity companies looking to bolster their defensive prowess can use AI to easily identify patterns and anomalies in system access records, or create test code, or as a natural language interface for analysts to quickly gather info without needing to program. Both sides are developing their arsenal of AI-based tools as fast as possible, and pausing that development would only sideline the good guys.
However, this does not mean that private companies should develop AI as a fully unregulated technology. When genetic engineering became a reality in the healthcare industry, the federal government regulated it within America to enable more effective medicine. The government recognized that other countries and independent adversaries might use it unethically or to cause harm, such as creating viruses.
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