It’s highly likely you’ve already seen the thousands of deep fakes featuring numerous political figures that have surfaced on the internet; the trend prompted Congress to call for regulation on the technology.

However, it would turn out that lawmakers don’t know much more about the technology than the average American does; many of them are intimidated by its capabilities.

Senator Cynthia Lummis spoke up on the matter, claiming she’d only just heard about ChatGPT from a friend. She was amazed by the limitless potential the technology already has, claiming it’s frightening if left unregulated.

It’s gotten so bad that both Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak sent open letters to AI developers, pleading with them to stop development for systems that would be more powerful than GPT-4 in the following six months.

Others pointed out that technology made more than a few jobs completely obsolete, due to how effective AI is at doing them and this competitiveness could pose a risk to society.

AI labs have been called on to work together to develop safety protocols that would prevent this from happening.

This is something akin to Isac Asiimov’s three laws of robotics, which would prevent them from endangering us humans, regardless of whether it is just taking our jobs away.

Senator Lindsey Graham also chimed in, claiming he’s yet to fully understand how AI works, but what he’s seen left him impressed with the technological advancements we’ve made.

He did, however, admit it’s a bit scary how human-like some of this AI can feel sometimes when you’re interacting with it, adding that it’s absolutely necessary to introduce some guidance to the technology.

On the other hand, Rep. Dan Mauser believes the technology to be astounding and one of the biggest breakthroughs we’ve made in IT sciences to date.

According to Mauser, ChatGPT and similar platforms are innovative and could be helpful in more ways than one.

While some of that may still be up for discussion, it’s hard to deny how impressive it can feel talking to a computer that could easily convince you there’s a person on the other side of the screen.

That’s not to say we should embrace the technology with open arms, but rather, that we should stay open-minded about it and see where it goes before jumping to conclusions right away.