Biden grew more worried about AI after watching Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning at Camp David, White House says | Daily Mail Online
By: Katelyn Caralle (Mail Online)
Not stranger than fiction anymore.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Joe Biden was apparently inspired by the latest Mission: Impossible movie to take more immediate action on curbing threats stemming from the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Biden signed on Monday an executive order seeking to balance needs for cutting-edge technology without risking national security and consumer rights.
Deputy White House chief of staff Bruce Reed watched Tom Cruise's most recent film Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One with Biden while relaxing one weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat.
The president's concerns about AI, Reed said, were only heightened by the film.
The villain in the Mission: Impossible film is a sentient and rogue AI known as 'the Entity,' which sinks a submarine and kills its crew in the movie's first few minutes.
'If he hadn't already been concerned about what could go wrong with AI before that movie, he saw plenty more to worry about,' Reed said in an interview.
President Joe Biden's focus on Artificial Intelligence was heightened after watching Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One while at Camp David earlier this year
The villain in the latest installment of Tom Cruise's action film franchise is a sentient and rogue AI known as 'the Entity,' which sinks a submarine and kills its crew in the movie's first few minutes
In the weeks leading up to drafting the order, Biden grew increasingly interested and curious about the topic of AI.
Before signing the order Monday, Biden said AI is driving change at 'warp speed' and carries tremendous potential as well as perils.
'AI is all around us,' Biden said. 'To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risk, we need to govern this technology.'
The president's science advisory council focused on AI at two meetings and his cabinet also discussed it at two separate meetings.
Biden pressed tech executives and advocates about the technology's capabilities at multiple gatherings.
'He was as impressed and alarmed as anyone,' Reed said.
'He saw fake AI images of himself, of his dog,' he added. 'He saw how it can make bad poetry. And he's seen and heard the incredible and terrifying technology of voice cloning, which can take three seconds of your voice and turn it into an entire fake conversation.'
The issue of AI was seemingly inescapable for Biden.
The order, which will likely need to be augmented by congressional action, is an initial step that is meant to ensure that AI is trustworthy and helpful, rather than deceptive and destructive.
It seeks to steer how AI is developed so companies can profit, but at the same time avoid putting public safety in jeopardy.
Using the Defence Production Act, the order requires leading AI developers to share safety test results and other information with the government.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology will create standards to ensure AI tools are safe before public release. And the Commerce Department will issue guidance on labeling and watermarking AI-generated content to help differentiate between authentic interactions and those generated by software.
The extensive order touches on matters of privacy, civil rights, consumer protections, scientific research and worker rights.
White House chief of staff Jeff Zients recalled Biden giving his staff a directive when formulating the order to move with urgency.
'We can't move at a normal government pace,' Zients said Biden told him. 'We have to move as fast, if not faster, than the technology itself.'
In Biden's view, the government was late to address the risks of social media and now U.S. youth are grappling with related mental health issues. It's likely he doesn't want to make the same mistake with addressing AI topics.
AI has the positive ability to accelerate cancer research, model the impacts of climate change, boost economic output and improve government services among other benefits. But it could also warp basic notions of truth with false images, deepen racial and social inequalities and provide a tool to scammers and criminals.
Biden's order builds on voluntary commitments already made by technology companies.
It is part of a broader strategy that administration officials say also includes congressional legislation and international diplomacy, a sign of the disruptions already caused by the introduction of new AI tools such as ChatGPT that can generate text, images and sounds.
Biden signed an executive order on Monday seeking to balance companies' ability to profit from AI, but also safeguards consumers
The guidance within the order is to be implemented and fulfilled over the range of 90 days to 365 days.
Last Thursday, Biden gathered his aides in the Oval Office to review and finalize the executive order.
The planned 30-minute meeting stretched to 70 minutes, despite other pressing matters, including the mass shooting in Maine, the Israel-Hamas war and the selection of a new House speaker.
China, a key AI rival to the U.S., has also set some rules around the emergence and swift rise of artificial intelligence.
The U.S. is home to many of the leading developers of cutting-edge AI technology, including tech giants Google, Meta and Microsoft, and AI-focused start-ups such as OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT.
The White House took advantage of that industry weight earlier this year when it secured commitments from those companies to implement safety mechanisms as they build new AI models.
But the White House also faced significant pressure from Democratic allies, including labor and civil rights groups, to make sure its policies reflected their concerns about AI's real-world harms.
Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a former Biden administration official who helped craft principles for approaching AI, said one of the biggest challenges within the federal government has been what to do about law enforcement's use of AI tools, including at US borders.
'These are all places where we know that the use of automation is very problematic, with facial recognition, drone technology,' Venkatasubramanian said.
Facial recognition technology has been shown to perform unevenly across racial groups, and has been tied to mistaken arrests.
The American Civil Liberties Union is among the groups that met with the White House to try to ensure 'we're holding the tech industry and tech billionaires accountable.'
ReNika Moore, director of the ACLU's racial justice program, who attended Monday's signing, said they want to ensure algorithmic tools 'work for all of us and not just a few.'
After seeing the text of the order, Moore applauded how it addressed discrimination and other AI harms in workplaces and housing, but said the administration 'essentially kicks the can down the road' in protecting people from law enforcement's growing use of the technology.
No Trump, trolling, fascism crap
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Well isn't that special................
The article does even come close to asserting or proving that Biden took any action at all based on having watched a movie.
Makes one wonder what would happen if he watched Jurassic Park or Jumanji
Maybe that's why he sent his Border/Abortion Rights/Space Council/Voting Rights/AI Czar to London today? She is, after all, artificially intelligent.
I hope nobody ever lets Joe watch Dr. Strangelove or The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming. He'd most likely believe that these movies are factual biographies.
That is somehow something to bitch about ?
I don't see where the author is bitching about anything. Perhaps you could specify where the bitching is?