The UK's competition watchdog has begun an assessment of the artificial intelligence market in an effort to assess the potential benefits and risks of a technology that Bill Gates calls "revolutionary as mobile phones and the Internet."
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced that it would look into the systems supporting technologies like ChatGPT in order to assess whether any further consumer safeguards or competition laws are necessary. According to the CMA, this will guarantee that AI tool development and deployment are carried out in a secure, responsible, and safe manner.
The potential advantages of this disruptive technology must be easily available to UK firms and consumers while ensuring that individuals are safeguarded from problems like incorrect or misleading information, according to CMA Chief Executive, Sarah Cardell.
The CMA has set a deadline of June 2 for the submission of opinions and supporting documentation, and it intends to disclose its findings in that month.
The statement comes as authorities around the world tighten their control over the advancement of generative AI, a tool that can produce text, images, and audio that are almost indistinguishable from work produced by humans. Fears over this form of AI's effects on jobs, industry, education, privacy, and practically every area of daily life have quickly followed the initial excitement surrounding it.
More than 2,000 business leaders and specialists in North America signed an open letter in late March asking for a six-month break in the training of systems more potent than GPT-4, ChatGPT's successor. Signatories included DeepMind researchers, computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, and Elon Musk. "Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks are well understood," the signatories advised.
Meanwhile, Dr. Geoffry Hinton, widely regarded as AI's "godfather," left his position at Google last week in order to speak out against the risks associated with the science he helped to create. Hinton worries that the prevalence of fraudulent images, videos, and texts on the internet may prevent the typical person from being able to "tell what's true anymore."
Sir Patrick Vallance, a former top scientific adviser to the UK government, recently informed members of the Science, Innovation, and Technology Committee that the impact of artificial intelligence on employment could rival that of the industrial revolution.
Anita Schjll Abildgaard, CEO and Co-Founder of Norwegian firm Iris.ai, is hopeful that the investigation will allay some of these concerns, "uphold consumer protections, and safely progress the development of AI," she told TNW. In addition, Abildgaard expects that the assessment would assist in addressing the "competitive imbalance" and "lack of disclosure" that Big Tech's private data and training models have.
However, Cardell is adamant that the evaluation would not be targeting any particular companies, despite the fact that the CMA and many others are undoubtedly concerned about the effects of AI technologies created by companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. She compared it to a "fact-finding mission" that would interact with "a whole host of different interested stakeholders, [including] businesses, academics, and others, to gather a rich and broad range of information."
Cardell makes it quite obvious that the CMA wants to foster, albeit with a few controls, the development of the quickly expanding AI business. According to her, this technology "has the potential to transform how businesses compete and drive substantial economic growth."
Similar sentiments were expressed in a UK government white paper released in March, which indicated ministers preferred not to create any specific regulations (or oversight bodies) to control the use of AI at this time. This is in contrast to the EU, which is now finalizing its historic AI Act, the first AI regulation by a significant regulatory authority in the world.
Even though the EU has been at the forefront, politicians should not get caught up in the "hysteria" and shouldn't "rush to regulate AI before anyone else does because that likely will bode ill, and lead to missed opportunities, for society."
Whatever the case, it is obvious that governments are attempting to determine whether and how to regulate generative AI in light of its quick development.
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