Regulators and law enforcement agencies in Europe have warned against the growing risks posed by generative artificial intelligence (AI) platforms like ChatGPT.
ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform which responds to user queries in the form of essays, poems, spreadsheets, and computer code, has recorded over 1.6 billion visits since December.
The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, Europol, warned at the end of March that ChatGPT, just one of the thousands of AI platforms currently in use, can assist criminals with phishing, malware creation, and even terrorist acts.
According to Europol report, “If a potential criminal knows nothing about a particular crime area, ChatGPT can speed up the research process significantly by offering key information that can then be further explored in subsequent steps.”
“As such, ChatGPT can be used to learn about a vast number of potential crime areas with no prior knowledge, ranging from how to break into a home to terrorism, cybercrime, and child sexual abuse.”
Last month the Italian privacy rights board Garante threatened OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT with millions of dollars in fines for privacy violations until it addresses questions of where users’ information goes and implements age restrictions.
This followed a glitch on ChatGPT which exposed user files and led to a temporary ban by Italy.
Also, Spain, France, and Germany are looking into complaints of personal data violations.
According to experts, the efficiency of AI technology also heralds all kinds of fraud such as identity theft and plagiarism in schools.
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Deputy director of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, Nick Taylor, told Yahoo News that “for educators, the possibility that submitted coursework might have been assisted by, or even entirely written by, a generative AI system like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard, is a cause for concern.”
Artificial intelligence has been existing for several years such as Amazon’s Alexa and online chess games. However, its significance has been made manifest by the potential of AI like ChatGPT.
The CEO of Futurity Systems, Cecilia Tham, said since ChatGPT was introduced as a free trial to the public on November 30 last year, programmers have been adapting it to develop thousands of new chatbots, from PlantGPT, which helps to monitor houseplants, to the hypothetical ChaosGPT that is designed to generate chaotic or unpredictable outputs.
Autonomous GPT, AutoGPT, can perform more complicated goal-oriented tasks. Tham, said with AutoGPT “You can say ‘I want to make 1,000 euros a day. How can I do that?’— and it will figure out all the intermediary steps to that goal. But what if someone says ‘I want to kill 1,000 people. Give me every step to do that?”
European Union legislators working on AI, this week called on President Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to convene a high-level global summit to set down a preliminary set of governing principles for the development, control, and deployment of AI.
