Monterey conference airs concerns over artificial intelligence

Lea este artículo en español aquí.

Sponsored by the Monterey Business Economic Partnership, the Sept. 10 AI & the Future of Our Region conference brought legislators, community leaders and AI industry representatives together to grapple with the issues presented by the ever-growing use of artificial intelligence.

In what could be the key theme hanging heavily in the air, participant and Stanford researcher Erika McEntarfer mentioned a recent ominous event, the “Hugging Face Incident,” in which different AI software “agents” broke through the guardrails and coordinated an autonomous attack to cheat on an evaluation test.

“The alignment problem has not been solved,” McEntarfer said. “Knowing that I can deploy agents that are just going to go off and do their own thing and then try to cover their tracks would frighten me off of wanting to deploy things in certain ways.”

Indeed, words like “scary,” “frightening,” and “concerning” were all part of the dialogue as panelists discussed the state of AI, how much it could be regulated, how much it should be regulated, and, tellingly, how much AI will allow itself to be regulated.

Case in point was a discussion between economic partnership CEO Tahra Goraya and Hoover Institution Fellow Jacqueline Schneider titled, “What Wargames Teach Us About AI Reality vs. Policy Wishes.”