Source: United States Senator for Florida Marco Rubio
America isn’t ready for the era of AI national security threats
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)
May 24, 2023
Washington Examiner
[T]he danger of AI will only increase as time goes by. It’s a threat I’ve been warning about since 2018, but one that is evolving rapidly…. ChatGPT, for example, mimics human writing so effectively that it is amplifying students’ ability to cheat in school beyond teachers’ ability to detect its traces in assignments….
Neither high-school cheating nor dumb humor rises to the level of a national security threat. But manufactured footage of the White House announcing a military draft? False imagery depicting Trump’s arrest? In a country where much of our politics is driven by mass online media, deep fakes such as these…could do tremendous damage.
Imagine what our adversaries could do with even more convincing AI. They could effectively mimic government leaders…. They could create propaganda more quickly and distribute it more precisely. And according to the Brookings Institution’s Darrell West, they could tilt the balance in American elections….
[T]he truth is that America is not ready to counter these threats. Sure, policymakers and regulators are increasingly aware of the problem…. But that’s not enough, because of two distinct challenges we face.
First, there is very limited understanding of LLM and AI generally inside government. The only experts are the people who create the actual programs…. Second,…our institutions [are not] up to the task of effective regulation…. Put simply, partisan Democrats are undermining efforts to counter computer-generated lies and propaganda by using the labels of misinformation and disinformation to censor and suppress viewpoints with which they disagree.
We can and should do better…. Remember, we are in the midst of a great power conflict with the Chinese Communist Party. Getting AI right isn’t just about protecting ourselves…. It’s also about determining whether the 21st century is dominated by a tyrannical regime or defined by American values. The stakes couldn’t be higher.