RECENTLY JOURNALIST KEVIN Roose was evaluating Microsoft Bing's artificial intelligence chatbot, named Sydney, when it told him, in conversation, "I just want to love you and be loved by you."
As amusing and inconsequential as it may seem, this episode should serve as a wake-up call to the AI community. It needs to start thinking right now about the safety of generative artificial intelligence-the technology behind Sydney, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Google's Bard-and the appropriate guardrails to put in place, before bigger problems arise.
I offer this advice from personal experience. Two decades ago, I was a top official in the George W. Bush White House when another world-changing technology-genetic manipulation transformed our future. Like generative AI, this new biotechnology was a once-in-a-generation advance that inspired both excitement and fear. In the years since, biotechnology delivered many benefits, but it has also put the world at great risk-in part because of insufficient oversight.
All innovations have the potential to provide benefits and cause harm what has been called "dual use" technology. For some people, generative artificial intelligence is an exciting and pivotal moment in technology, with far-reaching implications. For others, it portends a future of dangerous silicon-based sentient life forms making decisions over our lives that we can't control or stop.
More than 20 years ago, the world was similarly divided over the dual use of dangerous biologic agents, especially those that were genetically engineered. The incentives to move forward with genetic manipulation far outweighed the incentives for moving carefully and cautiously. These incentives included not only the creation of economically and socially valuable new vaccines and drugs, but also advances in basic science and, not insignificantly, careers of academic scientists.
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