Grok Scandal: AI Industry Needs Regulation, Says Pioneer
The scandal over the flood of intimate images on Elon Musk’s X created non-consensually by its Grok AI tool has underlined how the artificial intelligence industry is “too unconstrained”,according to a pioneer of the technology.
Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist described as one of the modern “godfathers of AI”, said tech companies were building systems without appropriate technical and societal guardrails.
Bengio spoke to the guardian as he appointed the historian Yuval Noah Harari and the former Rolls-Royce chief executive Sir John Rose to the board of his AI safety lab.
X has announced it is indeed stopping Grok from manipulating pictures of real people to show them in revealing clothes such as bikinis, including for premium subscribers, after a public and political backlash.
Asked what the furore showed about the state of the AI industry, Bengio said the situation across the sector was “not completely a free for all” but needed to be addressed.
“It is too unconstrained and, because frontier AI companies are building increasingly powerful systems without the appropriate technical and societal guardrails, this is starting to have more and more visible negative effects on people,” Bengio said.
Part of the solution was better governance, he said, including placing moral heavyweights on company boards.As well as Harari and Rose, Bengio has appointed Maria Eitel, the founder of the Nike Foundation - a philanthropic wing of the multinational sport