The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has outpaced expert understanding of its risks and benefits. This is according to a new report by the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on AI published on Thursday.
“As capabilities advance, the evidence required for effective governance becomes increasingly complex to capture in real-time,” warned University of Pretoria’s Prof. Vukosi Marivate, one of 40 experts on the panel on Thursday.
“AI-generated child sexual abuse material and deepfake-enabled sexual violence now circulate more frequently on the Internet, disproportionately harming women and children,” the experts warn. “Sycophantic AI behaviour, where AI responses reinforce users’ existing beliefs regardless of accuracy, has been linked to several severe mental health incidents, including documented deaths.”
The experts warned that AI is improving in capabilities so quickly that they have overtaken efforts to understand the risks and mitigate them, saying that this could lead to catastrophic outcomes.
“There are no scientific guarantees that AI agents will not violate instructions, and evidence is accumulating of cases where they already violate them.”
With this report, the global AI experts are in a race against some of the biggest corporations on earth not traditionally beholden to policy concerns on the effects of rapid AI developments on societies. The report shows that companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon continue to spend hundreds of billions of US dollars per year developing and adopting AI technology mostly based in the United States of America.
“Computer infrastructure, evaluation expertise and data (e.g. to cover different languages) are concentrated where AI is built, leaving most Member States dependent on systems they cannot build, inspect, audit or fully adapt to local context,” the report warns.
“Rather than making policy recommendations, this report aims to provide every government with a shared, independent, and evidence-based foundation,” said Marivate.
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