Florida Senator Marco Rubio cautioned on Wednesday about the potential dangers artificial intelligence could pose to the security of the United States.
Writing in a Washington Examiner op-ed, the Republican senator warned that the dangers from increasingly intelligent and sophisticated AI algorithms would only increase with the passage of time, especially with the advent of AI language models such as OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT that understand, learn from, and generate human language.
“Manufactured footage of the White House announcing a military draft? False imagery depicting Trump’s arrest?" Rubio said. "In a country where much of our politics is driven by mass online media, deep fakes such as these, if distributed widely and marketed as true, could do tremendous damage."
He called for Americans to imagine the consequences of the nation's enemies using advanced AI systems to manufacture propaganda, charging that the US government does not currently have the resources to handle such a development.
"The tools to enact these operations are already in development, and the Chinese Communist Party – not to mention the Kremlin, Iran’s regime, cybercriminals, terrorist organizations and more – is planning to put them in motion, if it hasn’t done so already," Rubio wrote in the op-ed.
He castigated Democrats for “undermining efforts” to tackle the potential of AI being used for nefarious purposes by political actors or regimes.
"Put simply, partisan Democrats are undermining efforts to counter computer-generated lies and propaganda by using the labels of misinformation and disinformation to censor and suppress viewpoints with which they disagree," he wrote.
"We can and should do better. The US must lead the world in adapting to the AI future and partner with technological trailblazers to make the free world more resilient to foreign influence campaigns. And policymakers must put America’s long-term interests over short-term party politics," he added. "I know that’s asking a lot of Washington, but it’s what Americans need and deserve."