Former foreign minister Julie Bishop has warned governments are too cumbersome to regulate artificial intelligence and will need to lean on the tech sector to build guardrails around the ‘exciting but challenging’ disruptor.
Former foreign minister Julie Bishop has warned governments are too cumbersome to regulate artificial intelligence and will need to lean on the tech sector to build guardrails around the ‘exciting but challenging’ disruptor.
But Ms Bishop, who now serves as Australian National University’s Chancellor, said there was no point resisting technology such as ChatGPT, instead urging educational institutions to embrace AI.
Addressing the National Press Club on Wednesday, Ms Bishop said industry had a leading role to play to ensure a safe rollout of AI in Australia.
“Government regulation tends to be cumbersome and slow, and given the rapidly changing nature of AI, governments will never be able to keep up with the disruption,” she said.
“The Biden administration has brought the tech sector in to say you have to be part of this governance approach.
“I believe that is where Australia has a significant role to play through CSIRO, through (ANU’s) School of Cybernetics and others to help shape the environment and the governance rules that will hopefully assist us in providing guardrails around this most exciting but most challenging technological disruption.
The White House last week brought together chief executives of Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI to put pen to paper on safeguards for development and public release of AI.
Those voluntary measures include watermarking AI content, investing in cybersecurity, research on societal risk and using cutting-edge AI systems to solving society’s greatest problems.
“These commitments which companies will implement immediately underscore three fundamental principles – safety, security and trust,” US President Joe Biden said.
“We must be clear-eyed and vigilant about the threats emerging technologies can pose… to our democracy and our values.”
Ms Bishop said the United Nations also needed to step up to ensure competing nations were aligned on the issue. A UN board will report on global AI governance options by the end of the year.
Back in Australia, governments and education institutions have been grappling for the past year with how to use and regulate artificial intelligence.
While the technology was this year banned for WA public school students many Catholic, independent, and private schools have not followed in the government’s footsteps.
Ms Bishop said debates around AI echoed discourse from the early days of computing in the 1940s when fears about automation and replication of human cognitive behaviour surfaced.
“Our experts tell us… the most disruptive technologies are still ahead of us – whether it be through AI, quantum computing or genetic engineering,” she said.
“There is no point in resisting it, you harness it.
“Why not set an assignment for students that requires them to go to ChatGPT for an answer, then use that answer for a much better, more creative, more original response.”
ChatGPT launched on November 2022 and has already attracted more than 100 million users, about 40 per cent of whom live outside of the USA.
