OpenAI’s Vice President of Global Affairs Chris Lehane was in Sydney recently at SXSW.
He put forward the case for AI to be able to access content without restrictions as a means of winning the global AI arms race. Steve Ahern was there.
After his time in Washington as part of the Bill Clinton and Al Gore administration, Lehane “concluded that we were on the edge of a new industrial age, so I moved to San Francisco… to work with tech companies.”
“We are now moving from the industrial age to the age of intelligence,” he said. “AI is a general purpose, productivity driving technology.”
When a new technology comes along “you need to have discussions about values as well as the technology… You can build your values into technology… we can make choices to inform how that technology lands in the real world.”
Some of the values that Lehane put forward in his discussion were the importance of western societies “winning” over other countries that also want to dominate in the new age of intelligence. He contends that computer chips, technology and talent are some of the new battlegrounds. “The US and its allies will need to generate enormous amounts of energy each week to keep up with China… Whichever country wins this race wins the world,” he said.
Now that AI technology has been introduced, it won’t go back in its box and it won’t stop evolving. He predicts a world where control of the information pipes and algorithms will be the key to success. Lehane’s proposition was that Australia should work with America to make information available to AI so that it enriches the ability of generative AI tools to enhance productivity and “beat” autocratic rivals. “One of the two tech superpowers will become the player that the rest of the world depends on… Autocratic AI will not necessarily facilitate individual people to participate in AI on their own terms.”
“Australia is one of the top ten tech nations of the world. [You have] Canva, Atlassian, you have a base here with good renewable energy and you have fibre optics. There is room for growth here. If the Australian government and private sector are cooperative, you could create an Australian sovereign AI robust ecosystem. You could also become an exporter and get the productivity benefits. It will bring jobs and technology for the future.”
According to Lehane, the conversation has moved from ethics and safety to winning because countries will need AI for “future for economic opportunities.”
Responding to the pitch, then session moderator asked the pertinent question: Copyright theft is AI’s original sin. Why are you not doing more deals with content creators?
“Open AI has done more deals than other companies. Copyright comes back to fair use in the US, which allows models to use material for training. Other countries want to restrict that, but that means they may not have the AI ecosystem that they want or need. It will be up to each country to make these decisions… It is an empowering technology for anyone. It should be available to everyone,” he answered. “Technologies create more new jobs than they displace,” replied Lehane.
The benefits of AI, according to Lehane, will include:
- All students will have an individual teacher,
- better health care everywhere,
- incredible scientific breakthroughs (curing cancer, dementia),
- better productivity for a healthier democracy,
- it will dive productivity gains for abundance and a good life If imbued with the right values.
While the proposition put by Mr Lehane was very rosey, the trade offs and unknown harms that might result from unregulated freedom for AI to train on Australian data may not be in the interests of Australians.
Since Chris Lehane visited Australia, the government has decided against unregulated AI skimming of Australian’s creative content published on the internet. The Albanese government is also encouraging Australia’s own tech industry growth through a number of new schemes it plans to introduce.
In another SXSW session at Clear Hayes House, scientist, entrepreneur and futurist Dr Catherine Ball discussed the threats and benefits of AI with Yasmin London and Cassie Roma, hosts of the First Movers podcast.
Some of the changes coming as AI evolves will include:
- Grief tech – using tech to bring back lost loved ones. “It will be powerful but it should be accompanied by ethics.”
- Take AI slop and make money out of it. “Create an AI avatar to do your speaking for you on social platforms.” Youmimic, HeyGen and other similar tools claim to be safe to use for this purpose.
- Using safety code words to prevent scams. “I ask ChatGPT what my code words should be… I won’t use any of those words.”
- Digital Visual literacy is necessary. “Someone made a deep fake of me… How could people think that it is me, it was a bad fake but some peopel who were not aware of digital literacy were fooled and thought it was the real me.”
- ‘Pornificaiton’ apps are highly threatening and need to be controlled. Such apps had over 34 million visitors last year.
- People and machines will converse more using natural speech more easily with tools such as AlterEgo. A primary focus of this project, at this time, is to help support communication for people with speech disorders.
Ball has a warning for users of big tech tools who do not understand and are not careful about the tools they use:
“When you are looking at cat video slop, what are they giving away? We have sleep walked into a surveillance state… just stop looking and liking it, the algorithms want to engage with you…
“You can disengage from it, write to your MP, submit stuff to the Esafety commissioner. Don’t be a passive consumer of slop.”
Ball says the ESafety Commissioner is “preventing harm and danger in this country,” in calling out big tech, social media companies and AI for overstepping and intruding on privacy.
Steve Ahern is the publisher of this trade journal.
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