Government announces AI regulation consultation

This is the government’s first step to regulate the burgeoning field since the public release of ChatGPT in November last year.

Industry and Science Minister, Ed Husic, during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The government has announced an eight-week public consultation period to consider AI regulation, in its first step to regulate the burgeoning field since the public release of ChatGPT in November last year.

“We want modern laws for modern technology, and that is what we have been working on,” Science Minister Ed Husic told a press conference in Canberra.

“Australia already has laws and guardrails in place, but in this discussion – are they enough? We want the experts and the community to be able to step forward with their views and to provide contributions on that.”

“It is estimated [AI] could provide between one and four trillion in terms of economic revenue and we will get there by having community assurance, confidence in the way that the technology is being used and applied.”

He flagged more departments across the government would be considering the impact of AI in their respective fields in “coming weeks”.

“You will see over the coming weeks various portfolios that are putting out work, that they are doing to take into account that AI has different impacts in different portfolios, you can see that start to emerge.”

Opposition cyber security and home affairs spokesperson James Paterson earlier on Thursday welcomed the government’s announcement.

“I welcome the focus that the government is putting on this issue”, he told Sky News.

“It’s an enormously consequential, emerging issue for our economy and society.”

Senator Paterson drew attention to the mis- and disinformation generation capacity of AI.

“Frankly, you just can’t trust what your eyes see anymore with generative AI, particularly the images and video and audio that it’s able to produce which looks incredibly realistic. And both platforms and governments have to step up and take responsibility because otherwise we will be living in a world where you can’t trust the information that you receive, and that has profound consequences for all of us.”

Respected Australian UNSW AI professor Toby Walsh says existential fears from AI on par with nuclear war or pandemics are “overegged”.

“They’re not comparable to nuclear war or climate or pandemics. Those are real things that might wipe humanity off the planet.”

This comes after AI luminaries including OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman, and two of three ‘godfathers’ of AI Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio signed on a statement that warned of “extinction”.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads the statement, published by the US-based Centre for AI Safety.

Professor Walsh dismissed the claims.

“There are real risks, but they’re not existential,” he said. “We should be really concerned about the risk. We’re already seeing the risk. We’re already seeing stock markets being moved by deepfake images. We’re already seeing a fake picture of Trump being arrested. January 6th didn’t take much more than that.”

When asked whether the fact that the industry’s top minds signed on the statement gave him pause, Professor Walsh said, “I think intelligent people tend to think a bit too highly of intelligence.”

“When they turned the Large Hadron Collider on at CERN, before they did that, they calculated the probability they were going to make a black hole. It was non-zero, they did the probability … this is against the laws of physics, small possibility given the error bounds that we had on our knowledge of atomic physics that we would do that. I would put it like that.”