At today’s AI Seoul Summit, Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan announced that the UK government will offer grants to researchers to study how to protect society from AI risks such as deepfakes and cyberattacks.
Shahar Avin, an AI safety researcher, and Christopher Summerfield, the UK AI Safety Institute Research Director, will lead the programme within the UK government’s pioneering AI Safety Institute.
The research programme will be delivered in partnership with UK Research and Innovation and The Alan Turing Institute.
Applicants must be based in the UK but are encouraged to collaborate with other researchers from around the world.
The worldwide impact of the AI Safety Institute
The UK government’s pioneering AI Safety Institute is leading the world in testing and evaluating AI models, advancing the cause of safe and trustworthy AI.
Earlier this week, it released its first set of public results from tests of AI models.
It also announced a new office in the US and a partnership with the Canadian AI Safety Institute – building on a landmark agreement with the US earlier this year.
Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan said: “When the UK launched the world’s first AI Safety Institute last year, we committed to achieving an ambitious yet urgent mission to reap the positive benefits of AI by advancing the cause of AI safety.
“With evaluation systems for AI models now in place, Phase 2 of my plan to safely harness the opportunities of AI needs to be about making AI safe across the whole of society.”
Mitigating the potential impacts of AI
The new grants programme is designed to broaden the Institute’s remit to include the emerging field of ‘systemic AI safety’.
This field aims to understand how to mitigate AI’s impacts at a societal level and study how our institutions, systems, and infrastructure can adapt to the transformations this technology has brought about.
Examples of proposals within scope would include ideas on how to curb the spread of fake images and misinformation by intervening on the platforms that spread them rather than on the AI models that generate them.
Christopher Summerfield, UK AI Safety Institute Research Director, commented: “This new programme of grants is a major step towards ensuring that AI is deployed safely into society.
“It is designed to generate a huge body of ideas for how to tackle this problem and to help make sure great ideas can be put into practice.”
