It’s been a frenetic six months since OpenAI introduced its large language model ChatGPT to the world at the end of last year. Every day since then, I’ve had at least one conversation about the consequences of the global AI experiment we find ourselves conducting. We aren’t ready for this, and by we, I mean everyone–individuals, institutions, governments, and even the corporations deploying the technology today.
The sentiment that we’re moving too fast for our own good is reflected in an open letter calling for a pause in AI research, which was posted by the Future of Life Institute and signed by many AI luminaries, including some prominent IEEE members. As News Manager Margo Anderson reports online in The Institute, signatories include Senior Member and IEEE’s AI Ethics Maestro Eleanor “Nell” Watson and IEEE Fellow and chief scientist of software engineering at IBM, Grady Booch. He told Anderson, “These models are being unleashed into the wild by corporations who offer no transparency as to their corpus, their architecture, their guardrails, or the policies for handling data from users. My experience and my professional ethics tell me I must take a stand….”