These long-term “extinction” threats are headline-grabbing. But experts such as Geoff Hinton – an academic and former Google employee viewed as one of the “godfathers of AI”– think that the most immediate danger we should fret about is not that machines will independently run amok, but that humans will misuse them.
But the financial sphere is now emerging as another focus of concern. Last month the Kaspersky consultancy released an ethnographic study of the dark web, which noted “a significant demand for deepfakes”, with “prices-per-minute of deepfake video [ranging] from $300 [€272] to $20,000″. So far they have mostly been used for cryptocurrency scams, it says. But the deepfake Pentagon video shows how they could impact mainstream asset markets too.
There is also a proposal to establish a global AI monitoring body similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency ; Sunak is keen for this to be based in London. A third idea is to create a global licensing framework for the development and deployment of AI tools. This could include measures to establish “watermarks” that show the provenance of online content and identify deepfakes.
And the big problem that haunts any licensing system is how to bring the wider ecosystem into the net. The tech groups that dominate cutting-edge AI research in the west – such as Microsoft, Google and OpenAI – have indicated to the White House they would co-operate with licensing ideas. Their corporate users would almost certainly fall in line too.