President Joe Biden has made AI regulation one of his top priorities in recent months, with White House staff meeting on the topic several times per week in an effort to win fresh commitments from leading developers to limit AI and keep it from being used at its full potential. Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI |
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June 20 (UPI) -- President Joe Biden will kick off a second day of campaign stops in Silicon Valley Tuesday, meeting with artificial intelligence developers in San Francisco in a growing push to quickly regulate the new technology.
The president, who will be in California through Wednesday, was expected to discuss risk management with computing experts and several big tech executives who will be responsible for building and implementing AI functions in the nation's major industries.
Biden has made AI regulation one of his top priorities in recent months, with White House staff meeting on the topic several times per week in an effort to win fresh commitments from leading developers to limit AI and keep it from being used at its full potential.
Executives expected to meet with Biden Tuesday include Jim Steyer, the CEO of Common Sense Media; Tristan Harris, the co-founder of the Center for Human Technology; Joy Buolamwin, the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League; and Oren Etzioni, the former CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Some in the group expressed previous misgivings about the fast-rising tech, joining others who continue to warn about AI's potential to hurt jobs, promote disinformation, and boost racial inequality if not properly regulated.
Many others, though, have hailed AI's prospects for education, medicine and other industries as long as the apparatus could be reined in from the start.
During a news briefing ahead of Biden's trip, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that Biden remains "committed to fostering responsible AI to benefit society," while she also noted the security risks posed by the technology due to its rapid development.
"We're very much committed to this, and that's why the president and the vice president have held meetings with CEOs to talk about this incredibly important issue," Jean-Pierre added.
In early May, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with the heads of Google, Microsoft and other big tech companies at the White House as the administration seeks to implement federal controls to ensure the technology develops "responsibly."
The meeting was part of a broader effort by the administration to engage with policymakers around the world on the most pressing issues posed by AI.
The National Science Foundation was also planning to use $140 million of its own funds to launch seven new National AI Research Institutes across the country.
Additionally, the White House said it has received commitments from leading AI developers, including Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Stability AI, to participate in public evaluations of AI systems that will allow experts to explore ways to improve the technology for ethical purposes.
The administration has already taken numerous actions to rein in the popular tech that has been creating some buzz in recent months over its ability to create fictional but realistic depictions of the actual world, threatening music and art.
The Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division issued a joint statement vowing to protect the public from AI-related risks like these.
The administration has also issued a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights while Biden signed other executive actions to promote responsible innovation in the field, the White House said.
In February, Biden ordered all federal agencies to uproot bias in their technological action plans and to protect the public from algorithmic discrimination, which is also one of the primary capabilities of AI technology.
