Proposed legislation currently pending in Congress would address issues such as the development of technical standards, deepfakes and AI-generated voice messages, and transparency and accountability of GenAI use. Image: Rokas Tenys/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffConcerns about the potential risks of generative artificial intelligence continue even “federal agencies and Congress have been exploring GenAI uses, including for office tasks such as creating and summarizing content, writing speeches, and drafting bills,” says a report for Congress.
“Despite the impressive abilities of GenAI, its rapid growth has raised concerns and discussions about managing potential risks. For example, the tendency of GenAI to produce incorrect or misleading results, sometimes referred to as confabulation or hallucinating, might lead to the tools generating and amplifying misinformation or being used to create and spread disinformation,” the Congressional Research Service said.
“Because the models are generally trained on large amounts of data scraped from the internet, they can incorporate, reflect, and potentially amplify biases in such data,” it said.
Further, “Safety and security risks are ongoing concerns with GenAI tools.” For example, methods exist to trick them into ignoring built-in safety rules or into leaking sensitive data, it said.
Such concerns have led to enactment of several laws, including one codifying the establishment of a national AI initiative and one directing federal support of research on generative adversarial networks, it said. Proposed legislation currently pending in Congress would address issues such as the development of technical standards, deepfakes and AI-generated voice messages, and transparency and accountability of GenAI use, it said.
The report shortly follows the issuance by OMB of two memos encouraging federal agencies to accelerate use of AI. The Trump administration earlier had revoked a wide-ranging 2023 executive order that set internal governmental AI policies on matters such as ensuring that systems are safe, secure and trustworthy, and protections against fraud and deceptive content. A White House document issued along with the recent memos criticized the Biden administration policies as imposing “unnecessary bureaucratic restrictions.
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