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
