AI Safety

The United States outlawed unsolicited phone calls that use AI-generated voices. 

Hugging Face introduced four leaderboards to rank the performance and trustworthiness of large language models (LLMs). The open source AI repository now ranks performance on tests of workplace utility, trust and safety, tendency to generate falsehoods, and reasoning.

An alliance of major tech and media companies introduced a watermark designed to distinguish real from fake media starting with images. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) offers an open standard that marks media files with information about their creation and editing.

Retrenching after its November leadership shakeup, OpenAI unveiled a new framework for evaluating risks posed by its models and deciding whether to limit their use. 

Angst at the prospect of intelligent machines boiled over in moves to block or limit the technology. Fear of AI-related doomsday scenarios prompted proposals to delay research and soul searching by prominent researchers. Amid the doomsaying, lawmakers took dramatic regulatory steps. 

A new consortium aims to support open source AI. Led by Meta and IBM, dozens of organizations from the software, hardware, nonprofit, public, and academic sectors formed the AI Alliance, which plans to develop tools and programs that aid open development.

Europe’s sweeping AI law moved decisively toward approval. After years of debate, representatives of the European Union’s legislative and executive branches agreed on a draft of the AI Act, a comprehensive approach to regulating AI.

The U.S. state of Colorado started regulating the insurance industry’s use of AI. Colorado implemented the first law that regulates the use of AI in life insurance and proposed extending the limits to auto insurers.

An open source tool automatically tests language and tabular-data models for social biases and other common issues. Giskard is a software framework that evaluates models using a suite of heuristics and tests based on GPT-4.

Argentina’s recent presidential race was a battleground of AI-generated imagery. Candidates Javier Milei and Sergio Massa flooded social media with generated images of themselves and each other, The New York Times reported. On Sunday, Milei won the election’s final round.

OpenAI abruptly fired and rehired its CEO Sam Altman, capping five days of chaos within the company. On Friday, the OpenAI board of directors — whose membership since has changed — ousted CEO and co-founder Sam Altman from his leadership position and his seat on the board.

ChatGPT suffered a cyberattack apparently tied to the Kremlin. A ChatGPT outage on November 8 most likely was caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, OpenAI revealed.

An international conference of political leaders and tech executives agreed to regulate AI. 28 countries including China and the United States as well as the European Union signed a declaration aimed at mitigating AI risks. 

U.S. President Biden announced directives that control AI based on his legal power to promote national defense and respond to national emergencies. The White House issued an executive order that requires AI companies and institutions...

Large language models occasionally generate information that’s false. What if they produce output that’s downright dangerous? Text generators don’t know true from false or right from wrong. Ask an innocent question about food or health, and you might get an innocent — but fatal — answer.