AI security

When Is Technology Too Dangerous to Release to the Public?

Last week, the nonprofit research group OpenAI revealed that it had developed a new text-generation model that can write coherent, versatile prose given a certain subject matter prompt. However, the organization said, it would not be releasing the full algorithm due to “safety and security concerns.”

Instead, OpenAI decided to release a “much smaller” version of the model and withhold the data sets and training codes that were used to develop it. If your knowledge of the model, called GPT-2, came solely on headlines from the resulting news coverage, you might think that OpenAI had built a weapons-grade chatbot. A headline from Metro U.K. read, “Elon Musk-Founded OpenAI Builds Artificial Intelligence So Powerful That It Must Be Kept Locked Up for the Good of Humanity.” Another from CNET reported, “Musk-Backed AI Group: Our Text Generator Is So Good It’s Scary.” A column from the Guardian was titled, apparently without irony, “AI Can Write Just Like Me. Brace for the Robot Apocalypse.”