Does AI need a UN? Expert calls for global governing body to police ‘billions of pieces of misinformation’

The world needs a United Nations-like agency to regulate rapidly advancing artificial intelligence technology, particularly since governments are starting to pass laws that put varying demands on AI companies.

“Right now, we have 37 countries that passed laws about artificial intelligence last year, each of them doing their own thing,” said Gary Marcus, who hosts the AI-themed podcast, “Humans vs Machines with Gary Marcus.” “But there’s no coordination between what all of these countries are doing.”

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Without a shared regulatory body, AI companies might be forced to modify their software and offer different versions from country to country — or even state to state — to comply with each unique law, according to Marcus.

“It’s not good for the world if it’s all kind of a mess,” he told Fox News. “It’s not good for the [AI] companies if they have to train different versions of their models for every jurisdiction, maybe even California differently from Tennessee and so forth.”

“We need some coherence here,” said Marcus, who led Uber’s AI labs from 2016 to 2017 and co-authored the book “Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust.”

He suggested an international agency for AI regulation that includes government officials and leading scientists from around the world. Marcus didn’t say who should spearhead the effort, but stressed the importance of including the scientific expertise.

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An endoscopic neurosurgery robot — created by the Hong Kong Institute of Science and Innovation, Chinese Academy of Science’s AI & Robotics center — is seen during an exhibition. (Li Zhihua/China News Service via Getty Images)

Most governments “don’t really know that much about AI,” he told Fox News.

Marcus said he hopes an international agency would help restrain AI-generated misinformation. He said bad actors could use platforms like ChatGPT to “write billions of pieces of misinformation in a single day.”

“We don’t really have, I think, in any country laws to deal with that,” he said.

Marcus recently told Fox News that AI-generated content had already become realistic enough to dupe the public on a mass scale.

“An international AI agency could start to get countries to work together to try to figure out common penalties,” Marcus said. “There are lots of crossing-international-lines issues and so forth.” 

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Marcus says AI chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, could theoretically “write billions of pieces of misinformation in a single day.”  (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Rapidly advancing AI technologies threaten to open a pandora’s box of risks for the whole planet, according to the AI author.

“There are risks around … cyber crime, the possibility that machines are going to sort of trick people into committing cyber crime, the possibility that bad actors could lead to conflicts by manipulating markets,” he told Fox News. 

The global scope of those risks underscores the need for international coordination, Marcus said.

“I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that any one country, especially not a smaller country, is going to be able to deal with all of those threats on their own,” he told Fox News.

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