The Generative AI revolution is upon us and will potentially unleash a wave of technical and social change. Large Language Models (LLMs) alone are predicted to add $2.6 trillion-$4.4 trillion annually to the global economy. As one example of their potential impact, consider the ongoing pilot of Jugalbandi Chatbot in rural India (powered by ChatGPT). Jugalbandi promises to serve as a universal translator, accepting queries in local languages, retrieving answers from English-language sources, and presenting them back to users in their native language. This service alone can democratise access to information and improve the economic well-being of millions of people. And this is only one of hundreds of new services which are being developed.
Concerns
However, alongside positive developments, this AI revolution also brings risks. Most pressingly, AI powered tools are enabling bad actors to create artificial entities that are indistinguishable from humans online (via speech, text, and video). Bad actors can misrepresent themselves or others and potentially launch a barrage of variations on old harms such as misinformation and disinformation, security hacks, fraud, hate speech, shaming, etc.
