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generative artificial intelligence
Report Warns Generative AI Could Turbocharge Climate Disinformation
"The climate emergency cannot be confronted while online public and political discourse is polluted by fear, hate, confusion, and conspiracy," one campaigner warned.
Mar 07, 2024
Members of a global coalition on Thursday released a report detailing "significant and immediate dangers" that artificial intelligence poses to the climate emergency.
"AI companies spread hype that they might save the planet, but currently they are doing just the opposite," said Michael Khoo at Friends of the Earth, part of the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) coalition. "AI companies risk turbocharging climate disinformation, and their energy use is causing a dangerous increase to overall U.S. consumption, with a corresponding increase of carbon emissions."
As AI has rapidly developed over the past year, global leaders and experts—from United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—have sounded the alarm about the technology furthering disinformation on all topics.
The World Economic Forum earlier this year "identified AI-generated mis- and disinformation as the world's greatest threat (followed by climate change)," notes the new CAAD report. Citing cases in Slovakia and the United States, it says that "the world is already seeing how AI is being used for political disinformation campaigns."
"AI models will allow climate disinformation professionals and the fossil fuel industry to build on their decades of disinformation campaigns."
"AI models will allow climate disinformation professionals and the fossil fuel industry to build on their decades of disinformation campaigns," the document warns. "More recent attempts, such as falsely blaming wind power as a cause of whale deaths in New Jersey or power outages in Texas, have already been effective."
The publication specifically points to potential abuse of generative artificial intelligence, systems that create content—including text, images, music, and videos—in response to prompts. It states that "generative AI will make such campaigns vastly easier, quicker, and cheaper to produce, while also enabling it to spread further and faster."
Such content can include deepfakes, audio or video of a person appearing to say something they never did. The publication highlights that "an August 2023 study focusing on climate change-related deepfakes found over a quarter of respondents across age groups were unable to identify whether videos were fake."
"Adding to this threat, social media companies have shown declining interest in stopping disinformation, reducing trust and safety team staffing," the document stresses.
Invoking an old Facebook motto, Kairos Fellowship's Nicole Sugerman said that "we must not allow another 'move fast and break things' era in tech; we've already seen how the rapid, unregulated growth of social media platforms led to previously unimaginable levels of online and offline harm and violence."
In addition to social media, the report outlines concerns about disinformation spreading via large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, search engines, and online advertising. Sarah Kay Wiley, director of policy at Check My Ads, noted that "we are already seeing how generative AI is being weaponized to spin up climate disinformation or copy legitimate news sites to siphon off advertising revenue."
"Adtech companies are woefully unprepared to deal with generative AI and the opaque nature of the digital advertising industry means advertisers are not in control of where their ad dollars are going," she continued. "Regulation is needed to help build transparency and accountability to ensure advertisers are able to decide whether to support AI-generated content."
Oliver Hayes at CAAD member Global Action Plan also demanded swift intervention, arguing that "the climate emergency cannot be confronted while online public and political discourse is polluted by fear, hate, confusion, and conspiracy."
"In a year when 2 billion people are heading to the polls, this represents an existential threat to climate action."
"In a year when 2 billion people are heading to the polls, this represents an existential threat to climate action," he said. "We should stop looking at AI through the 'benefit-only' analysis and recognize that, in order to secure robust democracies and equitable climate policy, we must rein in Big Tech and regulate AI."
The report features recommendations for companies, lawmakers, and regulators to boost accountability, safety, and transparency related to AI. The suggestions echo coalition letters to U.S. President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and apply to not only disinformation but also energy and water use.
The limited company statements that are available and independent research show that the proliferation of LLMs "is already causing energy use to skyrocket," which "comes on top of the highest rate of increase in U.S. energy consumption levels since the 1990s," the document notes.
On top of that, "training large language models such as GPT-3 can require millions of liters of freshwater for both cooling and electricity generation," the report explains. "This thirsty industry therefore contributes to local water scarcity in areas that are already vulnerable, and could exacerbate risk and intensity of water stress and drought with greater computing demands."
Greenpeace USA senior strategist Charlie Cray said that "the skyrocketing use of electricity and water, combined with its ability to rapidly spread disinformation, makes AI one of the greatest emerging climate threat-multipliers."
"Governments and companies must stop pretending that increasing equipment efficiencies and directing AI tools towards weather disaster responses are enough to mitigate AI's contribution to the climate emergency," he added.
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Tech Experts Warn Humanity Must Act Now to Avoid 'Societal-Scale' Damage by AI
"It's time to get serious about advanced AI systems," said one computer science professor. "These are not toys. Increasing their capabilities before we understand how to make them safe is utterly reckless."
Oct 24, 2023
Amid preparations for a global artificial intelligence safety summit in the United Kingdom, two dozen AI experts on Tuesday released a short paper and policy supplement urging humanity to "address ongoing harms and anticipate emerging risks" associated with the rapidly developing technology.
The experts—including Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Andrew Yao—wrote that "AI may be the technology that shapes this century. While AI capabilities are advancing rapidly, progress in safety and governance is lagging behind. To steer AI toward positive outcomes and away from catastrophe, we need to reorient. There is a responsible path, if we have the wisdom to take it."
Already, "high deep learning systems can write software, generate photorealistic scenes on demand, advise on intellectual topics, and combine language and image processing to steer robots," they noted, stressing how much advancement has come in just the past few years. "There is no fundamental reason why AI progress would slow or halt at the human level."
"Once autonomous AI systems pursue undesirable goals, embedded by malicious actors or by accident, we may be unable to keep them in check."
Given that "AI systems could rapidly come to outperform humans in an increasing number of tasks," the experts warned, "if such systems are not carefully designed and deployed, they pose a range of societal-scale risks."
"They threaten to amplify social injustice, erode social stability, and weaken our shared understanding of reality that is foundational to society," the experts wrote. "They could also enable large-scale criminal or terrorist activities. Especially in the hands of a few powerful actors, AI could cement or exacerbate global inequities, or facilitate automated warfare, customized mass manipulation, and pervasive surveillance."
"Many of these risks could soon be amplified, and new risks created, as companies are developing autonomous AI: systems that can plan, act in the world, and pursue goals," they highlighted. "Once autonomous AI systems pursue undesirable goals, embedded by malicious actors or by accident, we may be unable to keep them in check."
"AI assistants are already co-writing a large share of computer code worldwide; future AI systems could insert and then exploit security vulnerabilities to control the computer systems behind our communication, media, banking, supply chains, militaries, and governments," they explained. "In open conflict, AI systems could threaten with or use autonomous or biological weapons. AI having access to such technology would merely continue existing trends to automate military activity, biological research, and AI development itself. If AI systems pursued such strategies with sufficient skill, it would be difficult for humans to intervene."
The experts asserted that until sufficient regulations exist, major companies should "lay out if-then commitments: specific safety measures they will take if specific red-line capabilities are found in their AI systems." They are also calling on tech giants and public funders to put at least a third of their artificial intelligence research and development budgets toward "ensuring safety and ethical use, comparable to their funding for AI capabilities."
Meanwhile, policymakers must get to work. According to the experts:
To keep up with rapid progress and avoid inflexible laws, national institutions need strong technical expertise and the authority to act swiftly. To address international race dynamics, they need the affordance to facilitate international agreements and partnerships. To protect low-risk use and academic research, they should avoid undue bureaucratic hurdles for small and predictable AI models. The most pressing scrutiny should be on AI systems at the frontier: a small number of most powerful AI systems—trained on billion-dollar supercomputers—which will have the most hazardous and unpredictable capabilities.
To enable effective regulation, governments urgently need comprehensive insight into AI development. Regulators should require model registration, whistleblower protections, incident reporting, and monitoring of model development and supercomputer usage. Regulators also need access to advanced AI systems before deployment to evaluate them for dangerous capabilities such as autonomous self-replication, breaking into computer systems, or making pandemic pathogens widely accessible.
The experts also advocated for holding frontier AI developers and owners legally accountable for harms "that can be reasonably foreseen and prevented." As for future systems that could evade human control, they wrote, "governments must be prepared to license their development, pause development in response to worrying capabilities, mandate access controls, and require information security measures robust to state-level hackers, until adequate protections are ready."
Stuart Russell, one of the experts behind the documents and a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, toldThe Guardian that "there are more regulations on sandwich shops than there are on AI companies."
"It's time to get serious about advanced AI systems," Russell said. "These are not toys. Increasing their capabilities before we understand how to make them safe is utterly reckless."
In the United States, President Joe Biden plans to soon unveil an AI executive order, and U.S. Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and John Kennedy (R-La.) on Tuesday introduced a generative artificial intelligence bill welcomed by advocates.
"Generative AI threatens to plunge us into a world of fraud, deceit, disinformation, and confusion on a never-before-seen scale," said Public Citizen's Richard Anthony. "The Schatz-Kennedy AI Labeling Act would steer us away from this dystopian future by ensuring we can distinguish between content from humans and content from machines."
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