When you turn on the faucet, you expect the water that comes out to be clean. When you go to the bank, you expect your money will still be there. When you go to the doctor, you expect they will keep your medical information private. Those expectations exist because there are rules to protect you. But when a technology arises almost overnight, the problems come first. The rules, you'd hope, would follow.
Right now, there's no technology with more hype and attention than artificial intelligence. Since ChatGPT burst on to the scene in 2022, generative AI has crept into nearly every corner of our lives. AI boosters say it's transformative, comparing it to the birth of the internet or the industrial revolution in its potential to reshape society. The nature of work itself will be transformed. Scientific discovery will accelerate beyond our wildest dreams. All this from a technology that right now, is mostly just kind of good at writing a paragraph.
The concerns about AI? They're legion. There are questions of privacy and security. There's concerns about how AI impacts the climate and the environment. There's the problem of hallucination -- that AI will completely make stuff up, with tremendous potential for misinformation. There are liability concerns: Who is responsible for the actions of an AI, or an autonomous system running off of one? Then there are the already numerous lawsuits around copyright infringement related to training data. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Those are just today's worries. Some argue that a potential artificial intelligence smarter than humans could pose a massive, existential threat to humanity.
What to do about AI is an international debate. In Europe, the EU AI Act, which is currently being phased in, imposes guidelines on AI-based systems based on their risk to individual privacy and safety. In the US, meanwhile, Congress recently proposed barring states from enforcing their own rules around AI for a decade, without a national framework in place, until backing off during last-minute negotiations around the big tax and spending bill.
"I think in the end, there is a balance here between enjoying the innovation of AI and mitigating the risks that come with AI," Alon Yamin, CEO of Copyleaks, which runs an AI-powered system for detecting AI-generated writing, told me. "If you're going too far in one end, you will lose something. The situation now is that we're very far to the direction of no regulation at all."
Here's a look at some of the issues raised around AI, how regulations might or might not address them and what it all means for you.
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Different approaches, with an ocean in between
Listen to the debates in Congress about how to regulate artificial intelligence, and a refrain quickly becomes apparent: AI companies and many US politicians don't want anything like the rules that exist in Europe.
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