\n<\/p>\n
Artificial intelligence models are already \u201ccheating, deceiving and going their own way\u201d, Australia\u2019s assistant minister for technology, Andrew Charlton, has warned, as the federal government\u2019s AI Safety Institute begins testing the latest models.<\/p>\n
In a speech to an AI safety forum in Sydney on Tuesday, Charlton said safety for AI matters now as \u201cAI systems are already doing things their creators never intended\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cCheating, deceiving, going their own way. The time to get ahead of that behaviour is while it\u2019s still confined to the testing lab, not after it reaches the real world,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Charlton said AI\u2019s social licence is precarious, and public trust in AI is low at a time when AI is becoming a general-purpose technology in every office, classroom and business. He said regulating safety for AI can act as an enabler, not a brake.<\/p>\n
Australia\u2019s approach to AI safety is to look both at what is available now \u2013 in gaming, apps, chatbots and medical scribes \u2013 as well as the latest models that could be a future risk, Charlton outlined.<\/p>\n
The assistant minister referred to Anthropic\u2019s admission last year that in a simulation, an AI agent managing a fictional company\u2019s email discovered that an executive planned to shut the agent down, and the same executive was having an affair, and in 96% of trials chose to blackmail the executive to abort its own demise.<\/p>\n
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email<\/span><\/p>\n He said the behaviours are being discovered in testing by people whose job it is to find them, highlighting the need for safety regulations for AI.<\/p>\n \u201cThe window to get ahead of this technology is open now. It will not stay open forever,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He said the AI Safety Institute, led by Dr Kate Conroy, with safety science research lead Prof Paul Salmon, had \u201chit the ground running\u201d and was already testing frontier AI models with technical partners.<\/p>\n AISI was also working with regulators and agencies to respond to emerging AI capabilities, risks, harms and trends, Charlton said.<\/p>\n The federal government had resisted calls for an overarching AI act to regulate the technology, and Charlton said the government had focused on a whole-of-government approach using existing laws.<\/p>\n \u201cAI safety will be pursued through every relevant agency and regulator, across consumer law, therapeutic goods, workplace health and safety, and online safety, backed by laws that already exist and strengthened, where they need to be, with new powers and tougher enforcement,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is not fewer rules. That is faster rules, applied by regulators who already understand their sectors.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Charlton again ruled out granting AI companies exemptions to copyright laws after reports Anthropic was lobbying for a so-called \u201ctext and data mining\u201d carveout in exchange for tens of billions of dollars of datacentre investment and support for a fund for artists and other creatives.<\/p>\n Guardian Australia last week reported such a proposal \u2013 which the ACT senator David Pocock labelled the \u201cultimate dirty deal\u201d \u2013 had been presented to ministers.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotionFree newsletter | When needed<\/p>\n Sign up to Breaking News Australia<\/span><\/p>\n Get the most important news as it breaks<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Speaking on Sky News, Charlton repeated that the government would not weaken copyright laws as he encouraged Anthropic to negotiate deals with creatives to use their content.<\/p>\n The Greens communications spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, said it would be a \u201cbetrayal\u201d of Australia\u2019s creative industries if Labor caved to big tech\u2019s demands.<\/p>\n \u201cIf they want to use copyrighted material to train their AI, they should pay for it like everyone else does,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The Labor MP and former industry minister Ed Husic said the companies should \u201cpay up if they want content\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can only take on face value what we\u2019ve said as a government, which is that copyright laws wouldn\u2019t change, and they shouldn\u2019t, frankly,\u201d Husic said.<\/p>\n On Sunday Guardian Australia reported internal health department documents revealing that for one AI technology \u2013 AI scribes used by medical professionals to document patient consultations \u2013 a number of different regulators including the Therapeutic Goods Administration and the privacy commissioner were all working together on how the technology should be regulated.<\/p>\n The first work undertaken by AISI is a collaboration with the Gradient Institute to assess the risk of AI agents that can undertake work on behalf of humans.<\/p>\n AISI is also partnering with the CSIRO on a project to ensure AI systems do what people intend them to do.<\/p>\n \u201cWe deal with alignment as humans from a young age. We learn rules, social norms and values that help us behave safely and responsibly: stopping at red lights, looking both ways before crossing the road, considering the impact of our actions on others,\u201d Charlton said.<\/p>\n \u201cAs AI systems become more capable, we need confidence that they will behave in a similarly predictable and trustworthy way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Artificial intelligence models are already \u201ccheating, deceiving and going their own way\u201d, Australia\u2019s assistant minister for technology, Andrew Charlton, has warned, as the federal government\u2019s AI Safety Institute begins testing the latest models. In a speech to an AI safety forum in Sydney on Tuesday, Charlton said safety for AI matters now as \u201cAI systems<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[1564,4618,2029,6756,1443,5698,1354,4112,722,1060],"class_list":{"0":"post-50997","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-artificial","9":"tag-assistant","10":"tag-australias","11":"tag-creators","12":"tag-intelligence","13":"tag-intended","14":"tag-minister","15":"tag-models","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-warns"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/50998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}