South Korea urges global cooperation on AI technology at Summit

At the Global AI Summit in Seoul, people discuss how to work together to make AI development safe. They also talk about job security, copyright, and being open to everyone. South Korea’s science minister stresses how important it is to work together in a world where technology is changing quickly.

South Korea’s science and IT minister said on Wednesday that everyone needs to work together to make sure AI development goes well. This came as his country wrapped up a global summit on quickly changing technology.

The AI summit in Seoul, co-hosted with Britain on Wednesday, discussed issues such as job security, copyright, and inequality. This came after 16 tech companies signed a voluntary agreement to develop AI safely the day before.

On Wednesday, 14 companies, including Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and six Korean companies, pledged to use techniques like watermarking to identify AI-generated content, create jobs, and assist socially vulnerable groups. “Cooperation is not a choice; it is a must,” South Korea’s Minister of Science and ICT (information and communication technologies) Lee Jong-Ho said in an interview.

Lee said, “The Seoul summit has further shaped AI safety talks and added discussions about innovation and inclusivity.” He also said that he thought the next summit would include more collaboration on AI safety institutes in the talks.

Global AI Summit highlights the need for collaborative regulation

The first global AI summit took place in Britain in November. The next one will probably take place in France in 2025. On Wednesday, ministers and officials from several countries talked about how state-backed AI safety institutes could work together to help regulate the technology.

While some AI experts advocated for the enforcement of rules, the majority concurred that the initial steps taken to regulate the technology were commendable.

Head of the Ada Lovelace Institute for AI, Francine Bennett, said, “We need to move beyond voluntary; the people who will be affected should be setting the rules through their governments.”

AI services should demonstrate that they meet required safety standards before going on sale. This way, companies can balance safety with profit and avoid any public backlash that might come from AI systems doing bad things. Max Tegmark, the president of the Future of Life Institute, an organization that raises awareness about the risks of AI systems, made this statement.

Lee, the science minister of South Korea, said that laws often didn’t keep up with how quickly technologies like AI were changing. “But there needs to be flexible laws and regulations in place for safe use by the public.”