SAN FRANCISCO: As the race to build dominant AI solutions heats up, Google boss Sundar Pichai has spoken out in favour of legal guard rails for new technology that is expected to change workflows across various industries in the coming years.

Pichai referred in particular to the possibility of creating so-called deepfake videos, which can use the face of real people without their permission, notably in pornography.

"There has to be regulation. You're going to need laws. (...) There have to be consequences for creating deepfake videos which cause harm to society," Pichai said in an interview with US broadcaster CBS.

Experts have long warned of the danger of deception using so-called generative AI, which can produce text, images and videos.

Such concerns were recently heightened, for example, by an artificially generated photo of the Pope and an AI-generated series of images showing what appeared to be the arrest of ex-US President Donald Trump.

The software generates its own content based on vast amounts of information that it has processed for learning. In the case of texts, for example, programmes like ChatGPT estimate word by word how a sentence should continue.

One consequence of the principle is currently that they can sometimes output completely wrong information - without this being recognisable to the user.

"Anybody who has worked with AI for a while (realises) this is something so different and so deep that we would need societal regulations to think about how to adapt," Pichai said. You don't want to bring technology into the public domain that society is not prepared for, he added.

The current AI race among major tech players was sparked by the release of ChatGPT by start-up OpenAI late last year. Google had been working on various AI applications for years, but was always reluctant to make it publicly available, citing social responsibility.

However, the collaboration between OpenAI and Google's rival Microsoft has forced the company into making a public answer to ChatGPT.

 - dpa