HARRISBURG, Pa. – Pennsylvania’s attorney general is leading a coalition of more than 40 attorneys general, calling on artificial intelligence software companies to protect people from chatbots.
“There’s certainly revolutions. There’s industrial revolution, and this is a bigger revolution than that,” said Eric Robuck, cybersecurity professor, Alvernia University.
Artificial intelligence is changing the world as we know it.
“We really have to look closely about how AI is changing society, and how it’s going to change society, and put some sort of guardrails in,” Robuck said.
“I think everything in life is a balance,” he said. “You have to balance that between a perceived or realistic cyber arms race with other countries like Russia and China, because they’re certainly not going to slow down.”
A coalition of 42 attorneys general, including Dave Sunday from Pennsylvania, says this new technology is concerning, especially chatbots.
“The concern, of course, is real. AI is not an individual, it’s a machine, right? And that machine is trained. It doesn’t have judgment; it doesn’t have compassion; it doesn’t have malice. It’s just a machine,” Robuck said.
In a letter to companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta and Microsoft, the coalition is demanding more quality control and other safeguards over chatbots by early next year. The letter cites dangers of the technology, and references tragedies, including deaths and suicides.
“There is certainly a mental health crisis in this country. So, you put that in with AI, and you certainly can have big problems,” Robuck said. “I don’t know what the solution is. It’s an awfully big problem for the companies to say, if there’s a teenage person here asking me questions, to answer this way. I don’t know that that’s possible.”
The coalition is calling for AI companies to commit to making changes by mid-January.