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'Don't Support Bootlickers': ChatGPT Subscribers Vow Mass Cancellations After Pentagon Deal
"We can push OpenAI over the edge," said one group encouraging a boycott of the AI giant.
Mar 02, 2026
Calls to boycott OpenAI have been growing over the last several days after the artificial intelligence giant reached a deal with the US Department of Defense to use its ChatGPT chatbot across its classified network.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Friday said that the deal reached with the Pentagon would have "prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance" and maintain "human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems."
The DOD had previously gotten into a dispute with AI firm Anthropic, which refused to modify its Claude chatbot to allow for its use for domestic spying or to make final decisions on whether to take a human life.
President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he'd ordered the US military to stop using Anthropic's technology, describing the firm as "A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY" in a Truth Social post.
Shortly after Trump's post, Altman announced that OpenAI had reached a deal with the Pentagon. This led many critics to suspect that, whatever Altman's denials, the DOD would be allowed to use ChatGPT in ways that it had been forbidden to utilize Claude.
Adam Cochrane, who runs activist venture capital firm Cinneamhain Ventures, said immediately after Altman's announcement that he was canceling his ChatGPT subscription on the grounds that "I don’t support bootlickers."
Dr. Simon Goddek, a biotech scientist, also revealed that he was canceling his ChatGPT subscription and encouraged others to do the same.
"Companies understand one language: MONEY," he wrote. "If they support wars of aggression, they can’t profit from me. I’m out. What’s stopping you?"
AI consultant Mark Gadala-Maria accused Altman of being two-faced with his DOD deal, noting that the OpenAI CEO had expressed solidarity with Anthropic in the face of the Trump administration's attacks.
"Just a few hours ago he was on TV saying he stood by Anthropic," wrote Gadala-Maria. "Then he undercuts them and takes the same contract that Anthropic just lost. How can anyone trust this guy?"
An OpenAI boycott group called "QuitGPT" went online shortly after Altman's announcement, and the organization claims that it has gotten more than 1.5 million people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions or stop using it all together.
QuitGPT also outlined why its boycott of OpenAI could be potentially effective given the highly competitive nature of the current consumer AI market.
"ChatGPT is the biggest chatbot in the world, but that advantage is fragile," QuitGPT explained. "ChatGPT has been losing market share. Their creator, OpenAI, is losing three times more than they earn. ChatGPT users skew young and progressive, and many don't know about alternatives. We can push OpenAI over the edge."
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Watchdog Warns of Increased AI Propaganda, Deepfakes, and Harassment by OpenAI's 'Dangerous' Sora 2
"The hasty release of Sora 2 demonstrates a reckless disregard for product safety, name/image/likeness rights, the stability of our democracy, and fundamental consumer protection against harm."
Nov 12, 2025
Consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen on Wednesday issued a new warning about the dangers of Sora 2, the artificial intelligence video creation tool released by OpenAI earlier this year.
In a letter sent to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Public Citizen accused the firm of releasing Sora 2 without putting in proper guardrails to prevent it from by abused by malevolent actors.
"OpenAI must commit to a measured, ethical, and transparent pre-deployment process that provides guarantees against the profound social risks before any public release," the letter stated. "We urge you to pause this deployment and engage collaboratively with legal experts, civil rights organizations, and democracy advocates to establish real, hard technological and ethical redlines."
Among other things, Public Citizen warned that Sora 2 could be used as "a scalable, frictionless tool for creating and disseminating deepfake propaganda" aimed at impacting election results. The watchdog also said that Sora 2 could be used to create unauthorized deepfakes and revenge-porn videos involving both public and private figures who have not consented to have their likenesses used.
Although OpenAI said it has created protections to prevent this from occurring, Public Citizen said recent research has shown that these are woefully inadequate.
"The safeguards that the model claims have not been effective," Public Citizen explained. "For example, researchers bypassed the anti-impersonation safeguards within 24 hours of launch, and the 'mandatory' safety watermarks can be removed in under four minutes with free online tools."
JB Branch, Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen, said that the rushed release of Sora 2 is part of a pattern of OpenAI shoving products out the door without proper ethical considerations.
"The hasty release of Sora 2 demonstrates a reckless disregard for product safety, name/image/likeness rights, the stability of our democracy, and fundamental consumer protection against harm," he said.
Advocates at Public Citizen aren't the only critics warning about Sora 2's potential misuse.
In a review of Sora 2 for PCMag published last week, journalist Ruben Circelli warned that the tool would "inevitably be weaponized" given its ability to create lifelike videos.
"A world where you can create lifelike videos, with audio, of anything in just a minute or two for free is a world where seeing is not believing," he said. "So, I suggest never taking any video clips you see online too seriously, unless they come from a source you can absolutely trust."
Circelli also said that OpenAI as a whole does not do a thorough job of protecting user data, and also questioned the overall utility of the video creation platform.
"While some of the technology at play here is cool, I can’t help but wonder what the point of it all is," he wrote. "Is the ability to generate AI meme videos really worth building 60 football fields' worth of AI infrastructure every week or uprooting rural families?"
Consumer Affairs also reported on Wednesday that a coalition of Japanese entertainment firms, including Studio Ghibli, Bandai Namco, and Square Enix, is accusing OpenAI of stealing its copyrighted works in order to train Sora 2 to generate animations.
This has spurred the Japanese government into action. Specifically, the government has now "formally requested that OpenAI refrain from actions that 'could constitute copyright infringement' after the tool produced videos resembling popular anime and game characters," according to Consumer Affairs.
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'Red Flag': Analysts Sound Major Alarms As AI Bubble Now 'Bigger' Than Subprime
"I wouldn't touch this stuff now," warned one financial analyst about the AI industry.
Oct 03, 2025
Several analysts are sounding alarms about the artificial intelligence industry being a major financial bubble that could potentially tip the global economy into a severe recession.
MarketWatch reported on Friday that the MacroStrategy Partnership, an independent research firm, has published a new note claiming that the bubble generated by AI is now 17 times larger than the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, and four times bigger than the global real-estate bubble that crashed the economy in 2008.
The note was written by a team of analysts, including Julien Garran, who previously led the commodities strategy team at multinational investment bank UBS.
Garran contends that companies have vastly overhyped the capabilities of AI large language models (LLMs), and he pointed to data showing that the adoption rate of LLMs among large businesses has already started to decline. He also thinks that flagship LLM ChatGPT may have "hit a wall" with its latest release, which he said hasn't delivered noticeably better performance than previous releases, despite costing 10 times as much.
The consequences for the economy, he warns, could be dire.
"The danger is not only that this pushes us into a zone 4 deflationary bust on our investment clock, but that it also makes it hard for the Fed and the Trump administration to stimulate the economy out of it," he writes in the investment note.
Garran isn't the only analyst expressing extreme anxiety about the potential for an AI bubble to bring down the economy.
In a Friday interview with Axios, Dario Perkins, managing director of global macro at TS Lombard, said that tech companies are increasingly taking on massive debts in their race to build out AI data centers in a way that is reminiscent of the debts held by companies during the dot-com and subprime mortgage bubbles.
Perkins told Axios that he's particularly wary because the big tech companies are claiming "they don't care whether the investment has any return, because they're in a race."
"Surely that in itself is a red flag," he added.
CNBC reported on Friday that Goldman Sachs SEO David Solomon told an audience at the Italian Tech Week conference that he expected a "drawdown" in the stock market over the next year or two given that so much money has been pumped into AI ventures in such a short time.
"I think that there will be a lot of capital that’s deployed that will turn out to not deliver returns, and when that happens, people won’t feel good," he said.
Solomon wouldn't go so far as to definitively declare AI to be a bubble, but he did say some investors are "out on the risk curve because they’re excited," which is a telltale sign of a financial bubble.
According to CNBC, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who was also attending Italian Tech Week, said on Friday that there was a bubble in the AI industry, although he insisted that the technology would be a major benefit for humanity.
"Investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas," Bezos said of the AI industry. "And that’s also probably happening today."
Perkins made no predictions about when the AI bubble will pop, but he argued that it's definitely much closer to the end of the cycle than the beginning.
"I wouldn't touch this stuff now," he told Axios. "We're much closer to 2000 than 1995."
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'Nightmare Scenario': Watchdog Says AI Cybercrime Shows Vital Need for Regulation
"Countries with lax regulations, like the US, are prime targets for these crimes," said Public Citizen's J.B. Branch.
Aug 28, 2025
The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup Anthropic revealed Wednesday that its technology has been "weaponized" by hackers to commit ransomware crimes, prompting a call by a leading consumer advocacy group for Congress to pass "enforceable safeguards" to protect the public.
Anthropic's latest Threat Intelligence Report details "several recent examples" of its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot Claude "being misused, including a large-scale extortion operation using Claude Code, a fraudulent employment scheme from North Korea, and the sale of AI-generated ransomware by a cybercriminal with only basic coding skills."
"The actor targeted at least 17 distinct organizations, including in healthcare, the emergency services, and government and religious institutions," the company said. "Rather than encrypt the stolen information with traditional ransomware, the actor threatened to expose the data publicly in order to attempt to extort victims into paying ransoms that sometimes exceeded $500,000."
Anthropic said the perpetrator "used AI to what we believe is an unprecedented degree" for their extortion scheme, which is being described as "vibe hacking"—the malicious use of artificial intelligence to manipulate human emotions and trust in order to carry out sophisticated cyberattacks.
"Claude Code was used to automate reconnaissance, harvesting victims' credentials and penetrating networks," the report notes. "Claude was allowed to make both tactical and strategic decisions, such as deciding which data to exfiltrate, and how to craft psychologically targeted extortion demands."
"Claude analyzed the exfiltrated financial data to determine appropriate ransom amounts, and generated visually alarming ransom notes that were displayed on victim machines," the company added.
Anthropic continued:
This represents an evolution in AI-assisted cybercrime. Agentic AI tools are now being used to provide both technical advice and active operational support for attacks that would otherwise have required a team of operators. This makes defense and enforcement increasingly difficult, since these tools can adapt to defensive measures, like malware detection systems, in real time. We expect attacks like this to become more common as AI-assisted coding reduces the technical expertise required for cybercrime.
Anthropic said it "banned the accounts in question as soon as we discovered this operation" and "also developed a tailored classifier (an automated screening tool), and introduced a new detection method to help us discover activity like this as quickly as possible in the future."
"To help prevent similar abuse elsewhere, we have also shared technical indicators about the attack with relevant authorities," the company added.
Anthropic's revelation followed last year's announcement by OpenAI that it had terminated ChatGPT accounts allegedly used by cybercriminals linked to China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
J.B. Branch, Big Tech accountability advocate at the consumer watchdog Public Citizen, said Wednesday in response to Anthropic's announcement: "Every day we face a new nightmare scenario that tech lobbyists told Congress would never happen. One hacker has proven that agentic AI is a viable path to defrauding people of sensitive data worth millions."
"Criminals worldwide now have a playbook to follow—and countries with lax regulations, like the US, are prime targets for these crimes since AI companies are not subject to binding federal standards and rules," Branch added. "With no public protections in place, the next wave of AI-enabled cybercrime is coming, but Congress continues to sit on its hands. Congress must move immediately to put enforceable safeguards in place to protect the American public."
More than 120 congressional bills have been proposed to regulate artificial intelligence. However, not only has the current GOP-controlled Congress has been loath to act, House Republicans recently attempted to sneak a 10-year moratorium on state-level AI regulation into the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The Senate subsequently voted 99-1 to remove the measure from the legislation. However, the "AI Action Plan" announced last month by President Donald Trump revived much of the proposal, prompting critics to describe it as a "zombie moratorium."
Meanwhile, tech billionaires including the Winklevoss twins, who founded the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange, are pouring tens of millions of dollars into the Digital Freedom Fund super political action committee, which aims to support right-wing political candidates with pro-crytpo and pro-AI platforms.
"Big Tech learned that throwing money in politics pays off in lax regulations and less oversight," Public Citizen said Thursday. "Money in politics reforms have never been more necessary."
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The Intercept and Other Progressive News Sites Sue OpenAI
The media outlets claim the company violated copyright laws.
Feb 28, 2024
The Intercept, Raw Story, and Alternet joined forces on Wednesday to sue OpenAI for using copyrighted content to train its generative artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT.
The law firm Loevy + Loevy is representing the publications, and it has filed the lawsuit in the Southern District of New York. The firm claims OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by using copyrighted content from news organizations to train ChatGPT.
"Had OpenAI trained ChatGPT using these works as they were published, including author, title, and copyright information, ChatGPT may have learned to respect third-party copyrights, or at least inform ChatGPT users that it was providing responses that were based on the copyrighted works of others. Instead, OpenAI removed that information from its ChatGPT training sets, in violation of the DMCA," the firm said in a statement.
NEWS: @RawStory is suing @OpenAI, creator of #ChatGPT.
“I think it's time for tech companies to be proactive in compensating publishers for their work,” Raw Story CEO @JohnByrnester told @corbinbolies of @TheDailyBeasthttps://t.co/dVX1q1qsvA
— Raw Story (@RawStory) February 28, 2024
OpenAI is facing multiple lawsuits over its use of copyrighted material, including from comedian Sarah Silverman and The New York Times. The Times lawsuit also references violations of the DMCA. OpenAI recently claimed the Times "hacked" ChatGPT to get it to reproduce its copyrighted content.
Publications like the The Associated Press have formed partnerships with OpenAI where they license their work to the company, rather than suing them over the use of copyrighted content. According to the AI-based text analysis company Copyleaks, approximately 60% of the content generated by ChatGPT-3.5 is plagiarized.
OpenAI argues its actions fall under "fair use." In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court let a lower court ruling stand that said Google had not violated copyright laws by digitizing millions of books, so OpenAI may have a shot at winning with that kind of argument. It remains to be seen if any of the lawsuits against the company will make their way to the Supreme Court.
"Developers like OpenAI have garnered billions in investment and revenue because of AI products fundamentally created with and trained on copyright-protected material," said Loevy + Loevy partner Matt Topic, who represents the news organizations in the suits."The Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits the removal of author, title, and copyright notice when there is reason to know it would conceal or facilitate copyright infringement, and unlike traditional copyright infringement claims, it does not require creators to incur the copyright registration fees that often make traditional copyright infringement suits cost prohibitive given the massive scale of OpenAI's infringement."
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Now Is the Time to Regulate AI
Although the growing momentum and debate on AI governance is welcomed and urgently needed, the key question for 2024 is whether these discussions will generate concrete commitments and focus on the most important present-day AI risks.
Jan 17, 2024
The year 2023 marked a new era of “AI hype,” rapidly steering policymakers toward discussions on the safety and regulation of new artificial intelligence, or AI, technologies. The feverish year in tech started with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 and ended with a landmark agreement on the E.U. AI Act being reached.
While the final text is still being ironed out in technical meetings over the coming weeks, early signs indicate the Western world’s first “AI rulebook” goes someway to protecting people from the harms of AI but still falls short in a number of crucial areas, failing to ensure human rights protections especially for the most marginalized. This came soon after the U.K. Government hosted an inaugural AI Safety Summit in November 2023, where global leaders, key industry players, and select civil society groups gathered to discuss the risks of AI.
Although the growing momentum and debate on AI governance is welcomed and urgently needed, the key question for 2024 is whether these discussions will generate concrete commitments and focus on the most important present-day AI risks, and critically whether it will translate into further substantive action in other jurisdictions.
As we enter 2024, now is the time to not only ensure that AI systems are rights-respecting by design, but also to guarantee that those who are impacted by these technologies are not only meaningfully involved in decision-making on how AI technology should be regulated, but also that their experiences are continually surfaced and are centered within these discussions.
While AI developments do present new opportunities and benefits, we must not ignore the documented dangers posed by AI tools when they are used as a means of societal control, mass surveillance, and discrimination. All too often, AI systems are trained on massive amounts of private and public data—data which reflects societal injustices, often leading to biased outcomes and exacerbating inequalities. From predictive policing tools, to automated systems used in public sector decision-making to determine who can access healthcare and social assistance, to monitoring the movement of migrants and refugees, AI has flagrantly and consistently undermined the human rights of the most marginalized in society. Other forms of AI, such as fraud detection algorithms, have also disproportionately impacted ethnic minorities, who have endured devastating financial problems as Amnesty International has already documented, while facial recognition technology has been used by the police and security forces to target racialized communities and entrench Israel’s system of apartheid.
So, what makes regulation of AI complex and challenging? First, there is the vague nature of the term AI itself, making efforts to regulate this technology more cumbersome. There is no widespread consensus on the definition of AI because the term does not refer to a singular technology and rather encapsulates a myriad technological applications and methods. The use of AI systems in many different domains across the public and private sector, means a large number of varied stakeholders are involved in its development and deployment, meaning such systems are a product of labor, data, software, and financial inputs and any regulation must grapple with upstream and downstream harms. Further, these systems cannot be strictly considered as hardware or software, but rather their impact comes down to the context in which they are developed and implemented and regulation must take this into account.
Alongside the E.U. legislative process, the U.K., U.S., and others, have set out their distinct roadmaps and approach to identifying the key risks AI technologies present, and how they intend to mitigate these. Whilst there are many complexities of these legislative processes, this should not delay any efforts to protect people from the present and future harms of AI, and there are crucial elements that we, at Amnesty, know any proposed regulatory approach must contain. Regulation must be legally binding and center the already documented harms to people subject to these systems. Commitments and principles on the “responsible” development and use of AI—the core of the current pro-innovation regulatory framework being pursued by the U.K.—do not offer an adequate protection against the risks of emerging technology and must be put on statutory footing.
Similarly, any regulation must include broader accountability mechanisms over and above technical evaluations that are being pushed by industry. While these may be a useful string within any regulatory toolkit’s bow, particularly in testing for algorithmic bias, bans and prohibitions cannot be off the table for systems fundamentally incompatible with human rights, no matter how accurate or technically efficacious they purport to be.
Others must learn from the E.U. process and ensure there are not loopholes for public and private sector players to circumvent regulatory obligations, and removing any exemptions for AI used within national security or law enforcement is critical to achieving this. It is also important that where future regulation limits or prohibits the use of certain AI systems in one jurisdiction, no loopholes or regulatory gaps allow the same systems to be exported to other countries where they could be used to harm the human rights of marginalized groups. This remains a glaring gap in the U.K., U.S., and E.U. approaches, as they fail to take into account the global power imbalances of these technologies, especially their impact on communities in the Global Majority whose voices are not represented in these discussions. There have already been documented cases of outsourced workers being exploited in Kenya and Pakistan by companies developing AI tools.
As we enter 2024, now is the time to not only ensure that AI systems are rights-respecting by design, but also to guarantee that those who are impacted by these technologies are not only meaningfully involved in decision-making on how AI technology should be regulated, but also that their experiences are continually surfaced and are centered within these discussions. More than lip service by lawmakers, we need binding regulation that holds companies and other key industry players to account—and ensures that profits do not come at the expense of human rights protections. International, regional, and national governance efforts must complement and catalyze each other, and global discussions must not come at the expense of meaningful national regulation or binding regulatory standards—these are not mutually exclusive. This is the level at which accountability is served—we must learn from past attempts to regulate tech, which means ensuring robust mechanisms are introduced to allow victims of AI-inflicted rights violations to seek justice.
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OpenAI Cuts 'Military and Warfare' Ban From Permissible Use Policy
"Given the use of AI systems in the targeting of civilians in Gaza, it's a notable moment to make the decision to remove the words," warned one policy analyst.
Jan 12, 2024
ChatGPT maker OpenAI this week quietly removed language from its usage policy that prohibited military use of its technology, a move with serious implications given the increase use of artificial intelligence on battlefields including Gaza.
ChatGPT is a free tool that lets users enter prompts to receive text or images generated by AI.The Intercept's Sam Biddle reported Friday that prior to Wednesday, OpenAI's permissible uses page banned "activity that has high risk of physical harm, including," specifically, "weapons development" and "military and warfare."
Although the company's
new policy stipulates that users should not harm human beings or "develop or use weapons," experts said the removal of the "military and warfare" language leaves open the door for lucrative contracts with U.S. and other militaries.
"Given the use of AI systems in the
targeting of civilians in Gaza, it's a notable moment to make the decision to remove the words 'military and warfare' from OpenAI's permissible use policy," Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute and a former AI policy analyst at the Federal Trade Commission, told The Intercept.
"The language that is in the policy remains vague and raises questions about how OpenAI intends to approach enforcement," she added.
An OpenAI spokesperson told Common Dreams in an email that:
Our policy does not allow our tools to be used to harm people, develop weapons, for communications surveillance, or to injure others or destroy property. There are, however, national security use cases that align with our mission. For example, we are already working with [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] to spur the creation of new cybersecurity tools to secure open source software that critical infrastructure and industry depend on. It was not clear whether these beneficial use cases would have been allowed under "military" in our previous policies. So the goal with our policy update is to provide clarity and the ability to have these discussions.
As AI advances, so does its weaponization. Experts warn that AI applications including lethal autonomous weapons systems, commonly called "killer robots," could pose a potentially existential threat to humanity that underscores the imperative of arms control measures to slow the pace of weaponization.
That's the goal of nuclear weapons legislation introduced last year in the U.S. Congress. The bipartisan Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Act—introduced by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), Don Beyer (D-Va.), and Ken Buck (R-Colo.)—asserts that "any decision to launch a nuclear weapon should not be made" by AI.
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Report Urges Curbs on Development of 'Deceptive and Dangerous' Human-Like AI
"Lawmakers and regulators must step up and confront this threat before it's too late," the report's author warns.
Sep 26, 2023
Tech companies are creating and deploying artificial intelligence systems "that deceptively mimic human behavior to aggressively sell their products and services, dispense dubious medical and mental health advice, and trap people in psychologically dependent, potentially toxic relationships with machines," according to a report published Tuesday by Public Citizen.
The report—entitled Chatbots Are Not People: Designed-In Dangers of Human-Like AI Systems—asserts that "conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is among the most striking technologies to emerge from the generative AI boom kicked off by the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT. It also has the potential to be among the most dangerous."
"The subtle and not-so-subtle design choices made by the businesses behind these technologies have produced chatbots that engage well enough in fluid, spontaneous back-and-forth conversations to pose as people and to deceptively present themselves as possessing uniquely human qualities they in fact lack," the publication warns.
The report continues:
Deceptive anthropomorphic design elements... are fooling people into falsely believing AI systems possess consciousness, understanding, and sentience. These features range from AI using first-person pronouns, such as "I" and "me," to expressions of emotion and opinion, to human-like avatars with faces, limbs, and bodies. Even worse, AI can be combined with emerging and frequently undisclosed technologies—such as facial and emotional recognition software—to hypercharge its manipulative and commercial capabilities.
This, the publication says, is happening "with little or no testing, oversight, and accountability—including in places no one expects them, like the drive-thru at fast food restaurants, sometimes without any disclosure to customers."
The report contains a series of policy recommendations including:
- Banning counterfeit humans in commercial transactions, both online and offline;
- Restricting and regulating deceptive anthropomorphizing techniques;
- Banning anthropomorphic AI from marketing to, targeting, or collecting data on kids;
- Banning AI from exploiting psychological vulnerabilities and data on users;
- Special scrutiny and testing for all health-related AI systems—especially those intended for use by vulnerable people; and
- Severe penalties for lawbreakers, including banning them from developing and deploying AI systems.
"The tech sector is recklessly rolling out AI systems masquerading as people that can hijack our attention, exploit our trust, and manipulate our emotions," Public Citizen researcher and report author Rick Claypool said in a statement. "Already Big Businesses and bad actors can't resist using these fake humans to manipulate consumers."
"Lawmakers and regulators must step up and confront this threat before it's too late," he added.
In July, the Biden administration secured voluntary risk management commitments from seven leading AI companies, a move that was welcomed by experts—who also urged lawmakers and regulators to take further action.
A report on the dangers of AI published earlier this year by Claypool and tech accountability advocate Cheyenne Hunt urged a pause in the development of generative artificial intelligence systems "until meaningful government safeguards are in place to protect the public."
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Experts Urge Action to Mitigate 'Risk of Extinction From AI'
It "should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," says a new statement signed by dozens of artificial intelligence critics and boosters.
May 30, 2023
On Tuesday, 80 artificial intelligence scientists and more than 200 "other notable figures" signed a statement that says "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."
The one-sentence warning from the diverse group of scientists, engineers, corporate executives, academics, and other concerned individuals doesn't go into detail about the existential threats posed by AI. Instead, it seeks to "open up discussion" and "create common knowledge of the growing number of experts and public figures who also take some of advanced AI’s most severe risks seriously," according to the Center for AI Safety, a U.S.-based nonprofit whose website hosts the statement.
Lead signatory Geoffrey Hinton, often called "the godfather of AI," has been sounding the alarm for weeks. Earlier this month, the 75-year-old professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Toronto announced that he had resigned from his job at Google in order to speak more freely about the dangers associated with AI.
Before he quit Google, Hinton told CBS News in March that the rapidly advancing technology's potential impacts are comparable to "the Industrial Revolution, or electricity, or maybe the wheel."
Asked about the chances of the technology "wiping out humanity," Hinton warned that "it's not inconceivable."
That frightening potential doesn't necessarily lie with currently existing AI tools such as ChatGPT, but rather with what is called "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), which would encompass computers developing and acting on their own ideas.
"Until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general-purpose AI," Hinton told CBS News. "Now I think it may be 20 years or less."
Pressed by the outlet if it could happen sooner, Hinton conceded that he wouldn't rule out the possibility of AGI arriving within five years, a significant change from a few years ago when he "would have said, 'No way.'"
"We have to think hard about how to control that," said Hinton. Asked if that's possible, Hinton said, "We don't know, we haven't been there yet, but we can try."
The AI pioneer is far from alone. According to the 2023 AI Index Report, an annual assessment of the fast-growing industry published last month by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, 57% of computer scientists surveyed said that "recent progress is moving us toward AGI," and 58% agreed that "AGI is an important concern."
Although its findings were released in mid-April, Stanford's survey of 327 experts in natural language processing—a branch of computer science essential to the development of chatbots—was conducted last May and June, months before OpenAI's ChatGPT burst onto the scene in November.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who signed the statement shared Tuesday by the Center for AI Safety, wrote in a February blog post: "The risks could be extraordinary. A misaligned superintelligent AGI could cause grievous harm to the world."
The following month, however, Altman declined to sign an open letter calling for a half-year moratorium on training AI systems beyond the level of OpenAI's latest chatbot, GPT-4.
The letter, published in March, states that "powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable."
Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk was among those who called for a pause two months ago, but he is "developing plans to launch a new artificial intelligence start-up to compete with" OpenAI, according to The Financial Times, begging the question of whether his stated concern about the technology's "profound risks to society and humanity" is sincere or an expression of self-interest.
That Altman and several other AI boosters signed Tuesday's statement raises the possibility that insiders with billions of dollars at stake are attempting to showcase their awareness of the risks posed by their products in a bid to persuade officials of their capacity for self-regulation.
Demands from outside the industry for robust government regulation of AI are growing. While ever-more dangerous forms of AGI may still be years away, there is already mounting evidence that existing AI tools are exacerbating the spread of disinformation, from chatbots spouting lies and face-swapping apps generating fake videos to cloned voices committing fraud. Current, untested AI is hurting people in other ways, including when automated technologies deployed by Medicare Advantage insurers unilaterally decide to end payments, resulting in the premature termination of coverage for vulnerable seniors.
Critics have warned that in the absence of swift interventions from policymakers, unregulated AI could harm additional healthcare patients, undermine fact-based journalism, hasten the destruction of democracy, and lead to an unintended nuclear war. Other common worries include widespread worker layoffs and worsening inequality as well as a massive uptick in carbon pollution.
A report published last month by Public Citizen argues that "until meaningful government safeguards are in place to protect the public from the harms of generative AI, we need a pause."
"Businesses are deploying potentially dangerous AI tools faster than their harms can be understood or mitigated," the progressive advocacy group warned in a statement.
"History offers no reason to believe that corporations can self-regulate away the known risks—especially since many of these risks are as much a part of generative AI as they are of corporate greed," the watchdog continued. "Businesses rushing to introduce these new technologies are gambling with peoples' lives and livelihoods, and arguably with the very foundations of a free society and livable world."
Earlier this month, Public Citizen president Robert Weissman welcomed the Biden administration's new plan to "promote responsible American innovation in artificial intelligence and protect people's rights and safety," but he also stressed the need for "more aggressive measures" to "address the threats of runaway corporate AI."
Echoing Public Citizen, an international group of doctors warned three weeks ago in the peer-reviewed journal BMJ Open Health that AI "could pose an existential threat to humanity" and demanded a moratorium on the development of such technology pending strong government oversight.
AI "poses a number of threats to human health and well-being," the physicians and related experts wrote. "With exponential growth in AI research and development, the window of opportunity to avoid serious and potentially existential harms is closing."
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As White House Unveils Plan, A Fresh Call to Halt 'Runaway Corporate AI'
"President Biden should call for, and Congress should legislate, a moratorium on the deployment of new generative AI technologies," Public Citizen's Robert Weissman argued.
May 04, 2023
As the White House on Thursday unveiled a plan meant to promote "responsible American innovation in artificial intelligence," a leading U.S. consumer advocate added his voice to the growing number of experts calling for a moratorium on the development and deployment of advanced AI technology.
"Today's announcement from the White House is a useful step forward, but much more is needed to address the threats of runaway corporate AI," Robert Weissman, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement.
"But we also need more aggressive measures," Weissman asserted. "President Biden should call for, and Congress should legislate, a moratorium on the deployment of new generative AI technologies, to remain in effect until there is a robust regulatory framework in place to address generative AI's enormous risks."
The White House says its AI plan builds on steps the Biden administration has taken "to promote responsible innovation."
"These include the landmark Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and related executive actions announced last fall, as well as the AI Risk Management Framework and a roadmap for standing up a National AI Research Resource released earlier this year," the administration said.
The White House plan includes $140 million in National Science Foundation funding for seven new national AI research institutes—there are already 25 such facilities—that "catalyze collaborative efforts across institutions of higher education, federal agencies, industry, and others to pursue transformative AI advances that are ethical, trustworthy, responsible, and serve the public good."
The new plan also includes "an independent commitment from leading AI developers, including Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Stability AI, to participate in a public evaluation of AI systems."
Representatives of some of those companies including Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI—creator of the popular ChatGPT chatbot—met with Vice President Kamala Harris and other administration officials at the White House on Thursday. According to The New York Times, President Joe Biden "briefly" dropped in on the meeting.
"AI is one of today's most powerful technologies, with the potential to improve people's lives and tackle some of society's biggest challenges. At the same time, AI has the potential to dramatically increase threats to safety and security, infringe civil rights and privacy, and erode public trust and faith in democracy," Harris said in a statement.
"The private sector has an ethical, moral, and legal responsibility to ensure the safety and security of their products," she added.
Thursday's White House meeting and plan come amid mounting concerns over the potential dangers posed by artificial intelligence on a range of issues, including military applications, life-and-death healthcare decisions, and impacts on the labor force.
In late March, tech leaders and researchers led an open letter signed by more than 27,000 experts, scholars, and others urging "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4."
Noting that AI developers are "locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one—not even their creators—can understand, predict, or reliably control," the letter asks:
Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?
"Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders," the signers asserted. "Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable."
Last month, Public Citizen argued that "until meaningful government safeguards are in place to protect the public from the harms of generative AI, we need a pause."
"These systems demonstrate capabilities in question answering, and the generation of text, image, and code unimagined a decade ago, and they outperform the state of the art on many benchmarks, old and new," the group said in a report. "However, they are prone to hallucination, routinely biased, and can be tricked into serving nefarious aims, highlighting the complicated ethical challenges associated with their deployment."
According to the annual AI Index Report published last month by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, nearly three-quarters of researchers believe artificial intelligence "could soon lead to revolutionary social change," while 36% worry that AI decisions "could cause nuclear-level catastrophe."
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