AI Safety Newsletter

How AI enables disinformation Yesterday, a fake photo generated by an AI tool showed an explosion at the Pentagon. The photo was falsely attributed to Bloomberg News and circulated quickly online. Within minutes, the stock market declined sharply, only to recover after it was discovered that the picture was a hoax. This story is part of a broader trend. AIs can now generate text, audio, and images...

Examples of AI safety progress Training AIs to behave safely and beneficially is difficult. They might learn to game their reward function, deceive human oversight, or seek power. Some argue that researchers have not made much progress in addressing these problems, but here we offer a few examples of progress on AI safety. Detecting lies in AI outputs. Language models often output false text, but...

Geoffrey Hinton is concerned about existential risks from AI Geoffrey Hinton won the Turing Award for his work on AI. Now he says that part of him regrets his life’s work, as he believes that AI poses an existential threat to humanity. As Hinton puts it, “it’s quite conceivable that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence.” AI is developing more rapidly than Hinton expect...

Cybersecurity Challenges in AI Safety Meta accidentally leaks a language model to the public. Meta’s newest language model, LLaMa, was publicly leaked online against the intentions of its developers. Gradual rollout is a popular goal with new AI models, opening access to academic researchers and government officials before sharing models with anonymous internet users. Meta intended to use this str...

Policy Proposals for AI Safety Critical industries rely on the government to protect consumer safety. The FAA approves new airplane designs, the FDA tests new drugs, and the SEC and CFPB regulate risky financial instruments. Currently, there is no analogous set of regulations for AI safety. This could soon change. President Biden and other members of Congress have recently been vocal about the ris...

ChaosGPT and the Rise of Language Agents Chatbots like ChatGPT usually only respond to one prompt at a time, and a human user must provide a new prompt to get a new response. But an extremely popular new framework called AutoGPT automates that process. With AutoGPT, the user provides only a high-level goal, and the language model will create and execute a step-by-step plan to accomplish the goal....

Growing concerns about rapid AI progress Recent advancements in AI have thrust it into the center of attention. What do people think about the risks of AI? The American public is worried. 46% of Americans are concerned that AI will cause “the end of the human race on Earth,” according to a recent poll by YouGov. Young people are more likely to express such concerns, while there are no significant...