Why AI Transparency is Critical for National Security

Until now, artificial intelligence (AI) has been somewhat of a detrimental novelty. Yes, studies have shown that AI is making people lazier, and its habit of making up fake legal cases has caused some lawyers to be penalized. But it has, by and large, yet to cross over into a national security concern. 

That is changing. In late October, hundreds of major tech figures, including Apple’s Steve Wozniak, signed a letter urging Congress to pass a ban on “superintelligence.” And last week, Microsoft’s AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, argued that the pursuit of superintelligent AI should be an “anti-goal,” as it “doesn’t feel like a positive vision of the future.”

The concern from these figures emanates from the idea that society will, over the next few years, turn over many of its functions—from healthcare decision-making to missile targeting to AI—due to its ability to make quick, intelligent decisions. State and local governments have already started using AI to help run programs. But current large language models can never be truly “intelligent”: it’s just pattern recognition software that scrapes available information for answers. Because there’s a lot of bad data out there, it sometimes comes up with “facts” that are entirely false, something the aforementioned lawyers lamentably discovered. Major tech companies have cleverly sold AI as “intelligent” because it sounds trustworthy, but in essence, American society will be turning over key aspects of our society and economy to a technology that just guesses, often poorly.

Read more at The National Interest.