but rather, ‘What are we going to do to each other, facilitated or accelerated by AI?’”
“ChatGPT is not designed to succeed at giving us information or truth. It’s designed to give us the most probable completion,” explains Danks, alluding to the architecture that underlies ChatGPT and, put simply, is built to predict the correct next word in a sequence. While there are undeniable benefits that come from outsourcing certain tasks to technology, Danks, who serves on both the National AI Advisory Committee and the advisory board of the UC San Diego Institute for Practical Ethics, believes that people should be seriously concerned about the potential of these systems to inflict real harms on society without policies or regulations in place. For example, Danks is concerned about the potential for an increased spread of misinformation as generative AI becomes more widely used. “When we think about ethics and technology in general, we should always ask, ‘Whose values are being advanced or harmed by which uses?’” He adds, “We have to recognize that those capabilities could be put to problematic uses. We should be asking, not ‘What is the AI going to do to us?’ but rather, ‘What are we going to do to each other, facilitated or accelerated by AI?’”