Ridin' With BidenGPT

The White House has issued a long-anticipated executive order involving the regulation of artificial intelligence systems, which I know absolutely sounds like part of the opening exposition in the first five minutes of a Terminator franchise movie, but this is a dose of necessary reality here in 2023.

 

President Joe Biden signed a wide-ranging executive order on artificial intelligence Monday, setting the stage for some industry regulations and funding for the U.S. government to further invest in the technology.

The order is broad, and its focuses range from civil rights and industry regulations to a government hiring spree.

In a media call previewing the order Sunday, a senior White House official, who asked to not be named as part of the terms of the call, said AI has so many facets that effective regulations have to cast a wide net.

“AI policy is like running into a decathlon, and there’s 10 different events here,” the official said.

“And we don’t have the luxury of just picking ‘we’re just going to do safety’ or ‘we’re just going to do equity’ or ‘we’re just going to do privacy.’ You have to do all of these things.”

The official also called for “significant bipartisan legislation” to further advance the country’s interests with AI. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., held a private forum in September with industry leaders but has yet to introduce significant AI legislation.

Some of the order builds on a previous nonbinding agreement that seven of the top U.S. tech companies developing AI agreed to in July, like hiring outside experts to probe their systems for weaknesses and sharing their critical findings.

The order leverages the Defense Production Act to legally require those companies to share safety test results with the federal government.

It also tasks the Commerce Department with creating guidance about “watermarking” AI content to make it clear that deepfaked videos or ChatGPT-generated essays were not created by humans.

The order adds funding for new AI research and a federal AI hiring surge. The White House has launched a corresponding website to connect job seekers with AI government jobs: AI.gov.

Fei-Fei Li, a co-director of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, said in an interview that government funding is crucial for AI to be able to tackle major human problems.

“The public sector holds a unique opportunity in terms of data and interdisciplinary talent to cure cancer, cure rare diseases, to map out biodiversity at a global scale, to understand and predict wildfires, to find climate solutions, to supercharge our teachers,” Li said. “There’s so much the public sector can do, but all of this is right now starved because we are severely lacking in resources.”

 

And while this is a start, these remain guidelines without real enforcement consequences. Actual laws have to be written by Congress, and they keep dragging their feet as AI keeps getting further and further ahead. Ethical, social, and environmental concerns are great to have, but all this lacks any real hard and fast penalties for companies that violate them.

As it is, the major players in AI like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, all have a long history of violating federal antitrust, commerce and labor regulations. Asking them to play nicely here is not going to hold up for much longer when trillions are at stake in the years ahead for whichever company masters the process of successfully stealing a planet's worth of intellectual property to feed their Frankenstein's Monster first.

We're going to need something much, much stronger, if not an international treaty with watchdog organizations and monitoring the way we have for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons currently.

 

On top of that, we have to make it stick. We're not going to of course, not until it's well far past being too late. 

We may already be past that point now, to be frank.