AG James Hosted AI Symposium to Address Potential Opportunities and Risks of Generative AI Technology
New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a report on the potential benefits and risks associated with artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, as this technology rapidly advances and becomes more embedded in New Yorkers’ daily lives. The report followed a symposium, The Next Decade of Generative AI: Fostering Opportunities While Regulating Risks, organized by Attorney General James this past April. The symposium brought together officials from the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) and leading academics, policymakers, advocates, and industry representatives to help develop strategies to mitigate risks presented by developing AI technology while ensuring New York can remain at the forefront of innovation. Topics at the symposium included addressing information and misinformation sharing, data privacy, automated decision making, and potential healthcare uses for artificial intelligence.
“On a daily basis, we are seeing artificial intelligence utilized to improve our lives, but also sow chaos and confusion,” said Attorney General James. “The symposium I organized helped bring together government and industry experts to discuss and generate real plans and next steps on addressing AI technology, and I thank everyone for their participation and insights on this critical issue. As Attorney General, I want to ensure that government is stepping up to properly regulate AI, and ensure that its potential to help New Yorkers is realized, while its potential to cause harm is addressed and safeguarded against.”
Generative AI is a subset of AI that creates entirely new content like text, image, and audio in response to a prompt. Unlike traditional AI models that are specialized, generative AI can be used in a variety of ways and is broadly accessible to the public. While generative AI presents exciting opportunities to help people, the rapid spread of this new technology poses risks, such as data privacy concerns, the threat of misinformation, and the risk of bias, that must be addressed.
Participants in the OAG’s symposium engaged in panel discussions that identified fields of opportunity and their potential risks for AI technology, including generative AI. OAG's report details how the symposium kicked off with opening remarks from Attorney General James and Greg Morrisett, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost at Cornell Tech, highlighting the great opportunities, as well as potential risks, that must be navigated and regulated by government agencies as AI technology advances. Panels included: Generating Opportunity: How Might AI Enhance Our Lives in the Next Decade; The Next Decade of Generative AI Concerns; New York State of Mind; and What Now? Legal and Regulatory Options for the Future.
Over the course of the symposium, panelists discussed beneficial uses of AI technology, including generative AI, while mitigating the risks associated with the technology. Participants discussed how AI tools, by nature, require some adoption and testing to understand and improve the technology. The need for greater transparency in generative AI use was a major topic during the symposium, with multiple panelists suggesting the need to add clear disclosures to consumers to inform them when they are interacting with AI technology, and how their data is collected, used, and protected. Participants also discussed existing laws around discrimination, civil liberties, privacy, data security, defamation, fraud, deception, and competition that can be used to rein in some of the potential harms associated with AI technology. The panelists generally agreed on the need for greater government oversight over AI technology.
The OAG report details how symposium participants identified the healthcare field and streamlining administrative responsibilities as areas of opportunity for how AI technology can improve lives. Panelists discussed how people could benefit from major technological advancements in disease detection, monitoring trends in public health, and precision medicine. Additionally, AI technology can provide significant improvements for completing administrative tasks, such as writing computer code or automating translation, which would enable governments and businesses to better communicate with people in their native language and provide better access to information. However, the panelists also identified potential risks in these fields, including the use of AI-tools to generate misinformation, privacy concerns of patients, or discriminatory automated decision-making.
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