The UK will host a global artificial intelligence (AI) summit this fall to assess the "most significant risks" associated with the technology, according to the government.
Numerous ominous warnings about the potentially extinction-level threat AI poses to humanity have been made.
The creation of new regulations is a top priority for regulators everywhere.
According to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the UK should take the lead in efforts to make sure that AI's advantages are "harnessed for the good of humanity.". ".
We must ensure that AI is developed and used in a way that is safe and secure, he said, adding that it has the incredible potential to improve our lives.
Although the attendees of the summit have not yet been announced, the government stated that it would "bring together key countries, leading tech companies, and researchers to agree safety measures to evaluate and monitor the most significant risks from AI.".
The prime minister stated to reporters in Washington, DC, where Mr. Sunak and President Biden were having a conversation about the matter, that the UK was the "natural place" to lead the conversation on AI.
The prime minister's most recent meetings with the executives of top AI companies were cited as proof of this by Downing Street. The industry, which it claimed employed 50,000 people and was worth £3.17 billion to the UK, was also mentioned.
However, some have questioned the UK's ability to lead in this area.
According to Yasmin Afina, a research fellow at Chatham House's Digital Society Initiative, the UK "couldn't be too ambitious in a realistic sense.".
The Global Digital Compact of the UN, for example, had "stronger foundational bases already," she said, adding that there were "stark differences in governance and regulatory approaches" between the EU and US that the UK would find difficult to reconcile.
The most innovative AI companies worldwide are not located in the UK, Ms. Afina continued.
The UK should possibly concentrate on promoting responsible behavior in the research, development, and deployment of these technologies, she told the BBC, rather than trying to play a role that would be too ambitious for the country and run the risk of alienating it.
Since ChatGPT, a chatbot that stunned people with its capacity to provide complex answers in a human-sounding manner, first appeared on the scene last November, interest in AI has exploded.
Because of the incredible computational power that AI systems have, which has generated a great deal of unease, it is able to do that.
Geoffrey Hinton and Prof. Yoshua Bengio, two of the three so-called godfathers of AI, have been among those to issue warnings about how the technology they helped create has a great potential for harm.
Industry leaders in the field of artificial intelligence, such as the heads of OpenAI and Google Deepmind, issued a dire warning in May.
They provided examples, such as how AI might be applied to the creation of a new generation of chemical weapons.
These cautions have increased calls for effective regulation of AI, even though there are still many unanswered questions about what that regulation should look like and how it should be implemented.
Although the European Union has acknowledged that even in the best-case scenario, it will take two and a half years for the Artificial Intelligence Act to take effect, it is still drafting one.
Margrethe Vestager, the head of the EU's technology department, said last month that would be "way too late" and that the EU and the US were working on a voluntary code for the industry that they hoped could be developed within weeks.
Additionally, China has taken the lead in developing AI regulations, including ideas requiring companies to notify customers whenever an AI algorithm is being applied.
In a White Paper released in March, the UK government outlined its ideas, but it was criticized for having "significant gaps.". ".
However, Marc Warner, a representative of the government's AI Council, has suggested a stricter approach, telling the BBC that some of the most cutting-edge forms of AI may eventually need to be prohibited.
Even though others were leading the charge on AI regulation, Matt O'Shaughnessy, a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the UK could still play a significant role.
Without either of those two factors, he claimed, the UK would find it difficult to wield as much influence. "The EU and China are both sizable markets that have proposed consequential regulatory schemes for AI.".
He did, however, add that the UK was an "academic and commercial hub" with organizations "well-known for their work on responsible AI.".
According to him, those factors "all make it a serious player in the global discussion about AI."
