After sitting through two hours of testimony that Sam Altman and other artificial intelligence experts gave to the US Congress last month, Senator Josh Hawley took his turn at the microphone to summarise what he’d heard.

“So I’ve been keeping a little list here of potential downsides or harms or risks of generative AI, even in its current form,” the outspoken Republican senator for Missouri began. He was referring to the new breed of content-generating, or “generative” AI systems, like the ChatGPT chatbot that Altman’s company OpenAI had unleashed on the world last November.