Sam Altman Says He's 'Worried' About AI and Misinformation Ahead of the Presidential Election. Researchers Are Too
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI Getty Images
Inc.
Two years after the commercial generative AI explosion began, countries across the globe are gearing up for elections that will test their defenses against a potential onslaught of AI-generated propaganda meant to undermine democracy.
In an echo of 2016, when Russian troll farms meddled in the U.S. election, the possibility of disinformation deployed by a range of potential bad actors is again on the minds of U.S. officials. But this year, the addition of generative AI that uses written prompts to produce text, images, audio, and video exacerbates the challenges of stamping out efforts to sow distrust in elections or spread falsehoods about candidates and their policies.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, acknowledged at a Brookings Institute talk on Tuesday that the widespread use of AI makes election security trickier. "What I'm worried about is not more of the same, which I think we've built up technological defenses for and also societal antibodies," Altman said of the kind of fake news that ran rampant on social media before the 2016 election.
What does trouble him, he said, is "the new stuff that may only be possible with AI," he explained. "The sophisticated one-on-one, one-to-one persuasion that you just couldn't do before."
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