The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) technology concentrated in the hands of several powerful companies poses a “pretty profound threat” to online privacy, the president of Signal messaging app has said.
Speaking at a global summit on AI, Signal president Meredith Whittaker cautioned against a rush to introduce AI software into “every corner” of industry and society. There were “serious” concerns about how the technology might be used in ways that posed a “pretty profound threat” to personal privacy online, she told a panel talk at the Paris summit.
Ms Whittaker pointed to an AI feature Microsoft had floated called Recall, where computer users could ask a bot to pull up something they had been looking at previously.
The AI bot worked by screenshotting the desktop screen every few seconds, then scraping and storing the information in a text file on the computer, which it could pull its answers from.
Ms Whittaker, an outspoken critic of big tech, said the data stored as part of the AI feature posed a big privacy risk should a computer be hacked.
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“We are seeing a market that is really pushing to integrate AI into every corner, and not always being mindful about the consequences,” she said. “AI relies on data, there is nothing in the world it can ever know, nothing it can be intelligent about, that it didn’t find in the data, whether that is the training data or the data that is imported by human labour...or your data that you provide it in the form of prompts.”
She said the fact many of the big AI models were owned by companies pushing for returns on “billions of dollars of investment” was leading to corners being cut. “The type of AI we are talking about now, the bigger is better large-scale models, are a product of the concentrated power in the tech industry.”
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The fact a handful of powerful people were making decisions around the future of AI based on their plans to maximise revenue had consequences for democracy.
There was a “desperate need” for greater international co-operation around AI technology, said Mathias Cormann, the secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). While the technology would have “exciting” benefits and uses, it also came with “new and evolving risks every day.”
He said the international community was currently a long way away from having a joint approach to the emerging and rapidly advancing technology.
The AI summit bringing together tech executives and world leaders in Paris was organised by French president Emmanuel Macron. Attendees included OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai and US vice-president JD Vance.
Heads of state and governments are set to meet on Tuesday, the second day of the summit, to discuss AI policy.
On the eve of the summit Mr Macron announced plans to bring more than €100 billion of investment to France to spur on the development of AI companies in Europe.
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