On Slowing Down AI To Stay in Control
I had a discussion about AI yesterday with my wife. She came back from a two-day conference in Toronto. One of the sessions was about the place of AI in society and how it is time to engage in promoting and organizing some AI regulations.
The more I read and learn about AI capabilities as exposed in tools like ChatGPT, the more I think we will eventually need some regulation. For example, one thing we discussed (and on which we couldn’t agree) is the introduction of a delay in AI training. What I’d like to see is that AI companies are imposed a 2 or 3 years delay for their model training. And why would this be necessary? How would it change the game?
Remember that current training is lagging simply because we lack the processing power to digest all the digital information produced daily. But, eventually, it will come, just like Google replaced Yahoo when index content was initially entered manually by a group of people and then by a community. Sooner or later, ChatGPT or similar tools will digest the web in near real-time. And this is where this is going to be even more scary and could really get out of control.
Imposing delay on models training would help public knowledge and content to settle down and let consensus emerge in any research field, for example. Short-term noise would be reduced. In my opinion, it would be more challenging for ChatGPT to be infected by bad actors who will eventually try to influence results with toxic data.
My wife and I couldn’t agree on the effectiveness of this simple measure. She thinks that it would make ChatGPT useless or less relevant. My take goes the opposite side where, like in real life, things like encyclopedias are still helpful even though they were written and got frozen as soon as they were printed. So there is a need for them, like there is a need for more dynamic knowledge content like Wikipedia.
More than ever, we need to define what makes us unique, how we protect how uniqueness and consider slowing things down a bit, so we can have more time to understand what is going on and where things could go if we let things go without proper framing.
