False and misleading information amplified by cutting-edge artificial intelligence that threatens to undermine democracy and polarize society poses the greatest immediate risk to the global economy, the World Economic Forums said in a report Wednesday.
In its latest Global Threats Report, the organization also found that a number of environmental threats pose the greatest long-term risk. The report was released ahead of the annual meeting of the elite of global CEOs and executives in the Swiss ski resort of Davos and is based on a survey of nearly 1,500 experts, industry leaders and decision-makers.
The report identifies misinformation and disinformation as the biggest risk over the next two years and emphasizes that rapid technological advances also create new problems or worsen existing ones.
The authors fear that the development of generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT will mean that the creation of sophisticated synthetic content that can be used to manipulate groups of people will no longer be limited to people with specialized skills.
AI will be a hot topic at meetings in Davos next week, bringing together tech company executives including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and AI industry players like Yann LeCun, chief scientist of Meta Artificial Intelligence.
AI-driven misinformation and disinformation are becoming a threat as billions of people are expected to vote in elections this year in many countries, including major economies such as the US, UK, Indonesia, India, Mexico and Pakistan. and the following year, the report said.
“You can use AI to create deepfakes and actually influence large groups, which really leads to disinformation,” said Carolina Klint, head of risk management at Marsh, whose parent company Marsh McLennan co-authored the report with Zurich Insurance Group.
“Societies could become even more polarized” as people find it harder to check facts, he said. Fake news could also be used to fuel questions about the legitimacy of elected governments, "which means that democratic processes could be weakened, which could also further exacerbate social polarization," Klint said.
The development of artificial intelligence poses many other risks, he said. It can empower “bad actors” by making it easier to carry out cyberattacks, for example by automating phishing attempts or creating advanced malware.
With AI, “you don’t have to be the sharpest tool in the shed to be a bad actor,” Klint said.It could even poison data obtained from the Internet to train other AI systems, which would be "extremely difficult to reverse" and could result in bias being introduced into AI models, he said.
Another important global issue for risk survey respondents was climate change.After misinformation and disinformation, extreme weather events represent the second largest short-term risk.
In the long term — defined as 10 years — extreme weather was described as the No. 1 threat, followed by four other environmental-related risks: critical change to Earth systems; biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse; and natural resource shortages.
“We could be pushed past that irreversible climate change tipping point” over the next decade as the Earth's systems undergo long-term changes, Klint said.