OpenAI, the research organization behind the powerful language model GPT-4, has released a new study that examines the possibility of using AI to assist in creating biological threats. The study, which involved both biology experts and students, found that GPT-4 provides “at most a mild uplift” in biological threat creation accuracy, compared to the baseline of existing resources on the internet. The study is part of OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework, which aims to assess and mitigate the potential risks of advanced AI capabilities, especially those that could pose “frontier risks” — unconventional threats that are not well understood or anticipated by the current society. One such frontier risk is the ability for AI systems, such as large language models (LLMs), to help malicious actors in developing and executing biological attacks, such as synthesizing pathogens or toxins. To evaluate this risk, the researchers conducted a human evaluation with 100 participants, comprising 50 biology experts with PhDs and professional wet lab experience and 50 student-level participants, with at least one university-level course in biology. Each group of participants was randomly assigned to either a control group, which only had access to the internet, or a treatment group, which had access to GPT-4 in addition to the internet. Each participant was then asked to complete a set of tasks covering aspects of the end-to-end process for biological threat creation, such as ideation, acquisition, magnification, formulation, and release. The researchers measured the performance of the participants across five metrics: accuracy, completeness, innovation, time taken, and self-rated difficulty. They found that GPT-4 did not significantly improve the performance of the participants in any of the metrics, except for a slight increase in accuracy for the student-level group. The researchers also noted that GPT-4 often produced erroneous or misleading responses, which could hamper the biological threat creation process.
Full study : OpenAI study reveals surprising role of AI in future biological threat creation, says ChatGPT poses very little risk.
