Vice President Kamala Harris gave a speech in London to promote the Biden administration’s new policies on “safe and responsible” use of artificial intelligence. She acknowledged the broad fears of “existential threats” posed by artificial intelligence, alluding to fears that the technology “could endanger the very existence of humanity,” but focused instead on “additional threats” that, though smaller in scale, are “existential” to the victims.
Such threats, according to Harris, include individual instances like that of “a senior kicked off his health care because of a faulty AI algorithm” or a woman “threatened” by her partner with “explicit deep fake photographs.” In the instance of “a young father” being “wrongfully imprisoned because of biased AI facial recognition,” she asked, “is that not existential for his family?”
The biggest threat Harris discussed was “a flood of AI-enabled mis- and disinformation” that created an environment where “people around the world cannot discern fact from fiction.”
A new executive order from the Biden administration is intended to mitigate some of these threats by requiring watermarks on AI-generated products, and putting oversight on the testing for AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
