Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., has touted the benefits of artificial intelligence, but he told Newsmax on Friday the rapidly developing technology has some major drawbacks.
"I think we screwed up in Congress more than 10 or 15 years ago, not putting some guardrails around social media," Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren."
"We've done nothing since that time and we've got mental health issues with our kids, we've got challenges in terms of misinformation, disinformation.
"Boy, not getting it right on social media would pale in comparison if we don't get it right on putting some guardrails around artificial intelligence."
Warner talked about how some have apocalyptic predictions regarding artificial intelligence, giving an example from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," where the supercomputer HAL, seeing humans ignoring its advice, takes over the mission and kills an astronaut.
"There was an example recently that was only a war game," Warner said. "But it was an example where they said they used AI to say let's create a tool that will help identify a bad actor coming into an enemy space. You would still have the human being in there to make sure to make the ultimate decision.
"The human being in this game — again, this was just a test case, but this is what people say could potentially happen. The human being kept turning down the recommendation of the AI-generated answer to the point that AI in this test model decided, well, let me go after the human or let me go after the control tower that was supposed to be able to launch the missile to take out what the AI had been trained to [go] after."
Warner said he also is worried that AI models, such as ChatGPT, a large language processing model that generates human-like text in response to user prompts, might give out wrong information, such as with a medical diagnosis. A study published June 9 in The American Journal of Gastroenterology found ChatGPT failed to pass the 2021 and 2022 self-assessment tests for the American College of Gastroenterology.
"Boy, oh, boy, if you're talking about the potential for misinformation, disinformation, the challenges back to the predictive analysis around diagnosis on healthcare, that's a scary, scary potential outcome," Warner said. "It's an issue that I think it's going to affect all of our lives; a year ago, I was not sure it was going to be as big a thing as it is. I'm definitely a believer and I'm running as fast as I can to try to understand the implications, good and bad."
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