A leading official from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, warned on Friday that artificial intelligence brings forth ethical challenges that require immediate attention.

Shahbaz Khan, director and representative of the UNESCO Multisectoral Regional Office for East Asia, made the remarks at the ongoing World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2023, or WAIC 2023, in Shanghai.

“We stand at the precipice of a new era, an era defined by the transformative power of artificial intelligence,” said Khan. “This revolution, much like the great inventions of ancient times, has the potential to reshape our society, our economies, and our education systems. However, it also brings forth ethical challenges that require our immediate attention.”

With OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT grabbing worldwide attention, people have gradually become aware of the risky issues and threats surrounding AI.

Back in March, an open letter to “pause giant AI experiments” for at least six months garnered 31,810 supporting signatures from scientists, academics, technology leaders, and civic activists. Among the letter’s endorsers, were Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Geoffrey Hinton, who is known as the “godfather of AI”, and Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, who were joint winners of the 2018 Turing Award.

“I think we need to be careful about to make sure that it (artificial intelligence) is something that benefits humanity,” Musk said in a video speech delivered at WAIC on Thursday.

Industry experts at the event shared similar sentiments and spoke of existing and potential risks in various sectors, prompting them to call for improvements in AI ethical governance and rules to manage artificial intelligence.

One of the most concerning issues posed by AI, especially the generative AI, is the intellectual property dispute.

“The biggest challenge for generative artificial intelligence is the potential dispute on infringement,” said Wang Liming, a professor at Renmin University of China. “It is hard to clearly define the subject of infringement and to stipulate tort liabilities.”

He noted that although China’s existing legal basis is enough to solve these infringements at the current stage, it is still critical to build compliance standards and even special legislative provisions for generative AI in the near future.

Another issue drawing much attention is the safety of data in AI applications.

Zhou Kezhang, chairman of the board of China Construction Eighth Engineering Division Corp, pointed out the risk of leakage of confidential data and said such a thing could be fatal for a company, making it necessary to set up standards urgently, and for instructions and rules to be issued.

China has, however, already taken action on ethical governance in science and technology sectors.

In April, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology established two special expert committees that were asked to focus on ethics in science and information technology sectors.

Ren Aiguang, deputy head of the science and technology department at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, or MIIT, said it would continue to strengthen the governance system, and support the drafting of industrial standards, guidance, and regulations, to better drive the high-quality development of the AI industry.

And, on Friday, the Science and Technology Ethics Research Center of the CAICT, a research institute under the MIIT, issued “Self-regulatory Convention on Generative Artificial Intelligence Ethics (Draft Comments)” at the WAIC.

“We hope more innovative entities involved in the generative AI sector can join us, such as academies, research institutions, and companies. Only with joint efforts together, can we push the AI industry forward on a better and healthier way,” said Bi Chunli, vice-director of the center.

Wang Xin contributed to the story.