In pursuit of our mission, we are committed to ensuring that access to, benefits from, and influence over AI and AGI are widespread. We believe that at least three basic components are required to achieve these goals in the context of AI system behavior.[^scope]
1. Improve default behavior. We want as many users as possible to find our AI systems useful to them “out of the box” and to feel that our technology understands and respects their values.
To that end, we’re investing in research and engineering to reduce glaring and subtle biases in the way ChatGPT responds to different inputs. In some cases, ChatGPT actually rejects output that it shouldn’t, and in some cases doesn’t reject when it should. We believe that it is possible to improve in both aspects.
In addition, we have room for improvement in other dimensions of system behavior, such as the system “making things up”. User feedback is invaluable in making these improvements.
2. Define your AI values, within broad limits. We believe that AI should be a useful tool for individual people and therefore customizable by each user up to the limits defined by society. Therefore, we are developing an update to ChatGPT to allow users to easily customize their behavior.
This will mean allowing system outputs that other people (including ourselves) may strongly disagree with. Striking the right balance here will be challenging: taking personalization to the extreme would risk enabling malicious uses of our technology and fawning AIs that mindlessly amplify people’s existing beliefs.
Therefore, there will always be some limits on the behavior of the system. The challenge is to define what those limits are. If we try to make all of these determinations on our own, or if we try to develop a single, monolithic AI system, we will be failing in our Charter commitment to “avoid undue concentration of power.”
3. Public input on defaults and hard limits. One way to avoid undue concentration of power is to give people who use or are affected by systems like ChatGPT the ability to influence the rules of those systems.
We believe that many decisions about our defaults and hard limits need to be made collectively, and while practical implementation is challenging, our goal is to include as many perspectives as possible. As a starting point, we seek external information about our technology in the form of Red Team. We also recently began soliciting public input on AI in education – a particularly important context in which our technology is being deployed.
We are in the early stages of pilot efforts to solicit public input on issues such as system behavior, disclosure mechanisms (such as watermarking), and our implementation policies in general. We are also exploring partnerships with external organizations to conduct third-party audits of our security efforts and policies.
