ChatGPT's chief testifies before U.S. Congress as concerns grow about artificial intelligence risks

Societal concerns have led U.S. agencies to promise to crack down on harmful AI products that break existing civil rights and consumer protection laws

The head of the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT told Congress on May 16 that government intervention "will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful” AI systems.

“As this technology advances, we understand that people are anxious about how it could change the way we live. We are too," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified at a Senate hearing Tuesday.

His San Francisco-based startup rocketed to public attention afterit released ChatGPT late last year. ChatGPT is a free chatbot tool that answers questions with convincingly human-like responses.

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What started out as a panic among educators about ChatGPT's use to cheat on homework assignments has expanded to broader concerns about the ability of the latest crop of “generative AI” tools to mislead people, spread falsehoods, violate copyright protections and upend some jobs.

And while there's no immediate sign that Congress will craft sweeping new AI rules, as European lawmakers are doing, the societal concerns brought Mr. Altman and other tech CEOs to the White House earlier this month and have led U.S. agencies to promise to crack down on harmful AI products that break existing civil rights and consumer protection laws.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law, opened the hearing with a recorded speech that sounded like the senator, but was actually a voice clone trained on Mr. Blumenthal's floor speeches and reciting a speech written by ChatGPT after he asked the chatbot, “How I would open this hearing?”