Eight technology players, including American IT giant Microsoft, signed a charter to “build more ethical artificial intelligence” during a UNESCO global forum in Slovenia on Monday.
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After more than 50 countries adopted the first global rules on artificial intelligence (AI) in November 2021, “we are taking a new big step by obtaining the same concrete commitment from large companies,” welcomed Audrey Azoulay, Director General of UNESCO, quoted as saying in a press release from this UN body.
Such an alliance is “essential to developing AI that serves the common good,” she said.
In addition to Microsoft, the signatories also include LG AI Research, the research center of the South Korean conglomerate LG, the Chinese group Lenovo, the bank card issuer Mastercard, the American software group Salesforce and the Spanish telecommunications provider Telefonica.
Through this document, everyone commits to “fully playing their role in protecting human rights in the design, development, purchase, sale and use of AI.”
Specifically, companies must establish “verification procedures” to assess risks and address the “adverse effects of artificial intelligence within a reasonable time.”
The agreement was signed at the Kranj Congress Center near the Slovenian capital Ljubljana, where the second UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Forum on the topic is taking place.
It comes just days after European Union member states gave the green light to unprecedented legislation at the global level to regulate AI, following intense negotiations over the balance between innovation and security.
The appearance of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 by the Californian start-up OpenAI, capable of writing essays, poems or translations in a few seconds, and other systems that can generate sounds or images, showed the general public the immense potential of AI . But there are also certain risks: the distribution of fake, larger-than-life photos warns of the danger of opinion manipulation.