AI expert applauds 'much needed' report on gen AI from congressional watchdog

(TND) — The U.S. Government Accountability Office, the "congressional watchdog," has released a report detailing generative artificial intelligence – what it is, its uses, and the tech behind it.

“This is the first in a body of work examining generative AI,” Kevin Walsh, a director in GAO’s Information Technology and Cybersecurity team, said Monday via email.

The report was developed at the request of Sens. Gary Peters and Ed Markey. Peters chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

More reports are planned. The GAO mentioned best practices, societal and environmental effects, and federal development and adoption of generative AI as topics to tackle in future reports.

Walsh said he hopes the next report will be out later this year.

The benefits and risks of generative AI are still unclear for many applications, he said.

It's been over a year since ChatGPT ushered in AI's breakout year. As of last fall, ChatGPT developer OpenAI said the generative AI tool had 100 million weekly active users.

Generative AI systems are trained to recognize patterns and relationships in massive datasets and can generate text, code, images and video.

The tools can bring wide-ranging utility to a variety of settings, from health care, to education, to finance, to customer service.

But, as the GAO report noted, there are concerns about disinformation, worker displacement and even national security risks.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order last year to establish new standards for AI safety and security. The Biden administration has worked to get buy-in from private industry to develop AI in a safe and transparent way.

The new GAO report has a lot of the right information and touches on the major points, said Anton Dahbura, an AI expert and the co-director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy.

“I think it's much needed,” Dahbura said. “I think that the challenge is not so much in the generation of the report, but in the reading and understanding of the report by our national leaders.”

The senators who requested the GAO report and their congressional colleagues should use it to examine how generative AI could impact their constituents and the law, he said.

“Hopefully it should be taken very, very seriously, because I think that it is a critically important document for congressional leaders and their whole infrastructure and ecosystem to try to understand as much as possible,” Dahbura said.

Dahbura was encouraged that the senators showed interest in understanding generative AI.

“The days are gone of trying to treat AI as a black box sitting on the table that everybody's trying to dance around a little bit,” he said. “People are going to have to roll up their shirt sleeves and dive deeper in order to really understand the technology and its benefits and risks.”