Pressured by Biden, AI companies agree to guardrails on new tools

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

White House announced Friday, pledging to manage the risks of the new tools even as they compete over the potential of artificial intelligence. The seven companies — Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI — formally announced their commitment to new standards in the areas of safety, security and trust at a meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House on Friday afternoon. «We must be cleareyed and vigilant about the threats emerging from emerging technologies that can pose — don't have to but can pose — to our democracy and our values,» Biden said in brief remarks from the Roosevelt Room at the White House.

«This is a serious responsibility. We have to get it right,» he said, flanked by the executives from the companies. «And there's enormous, enormous potential upside as well.» The announcement comes as the companies are racing to outdo each other with versions of AI that offer powerful new ways to create text, photos, music and video without human input.

But the technological leaps have prompted fears about the spread of disinformation and dire warnings of a «risk of extinction» as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated and humanlike. The voluntary safeguards are only an early, tentative step as Washington and governments across the world seek to put in place legal and regulatory frameworks for the development of artificial intelligence. The agreements include testing products for security risks and using watermarks to make sure consumers can spot AI-generated material.