AI Insight Forum: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, S.A. Schumer, X’s Musk, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
Tech leaders called for regulation that balances innovation and safety as the Senate conducted one of the many “insight forums” to inform potential rulemaking.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) invited leaders in the AI space, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Nvidia president Jensen Huang, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and X chair Elon Musk to a bipartisan AI Insight Forum.
US lawmakers have had a busy week talking about regulating AI. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on artificial intelligence before the Insight Forum. Congress has held fairly regular hearings on various topics around AI regulation for months. The White House got commitments from companies to have a responsible use of the technology.
Meta is concerned with rolling out products powered by Artificial Intelligence and builds safeguards into its models. Powerful artificial intelligence models are going to be an important driver of opportunity in the future according to the company.
On the other hand, X’s Musk, who started an AI company recently, told reporters outside the forum that the government needs a federal AI oversight agency.
The New York Times reports several tech leaders remarked on the importance of regulating the technology, with OpenAI’s Altman saying he believes policymakers want “to do the right thing” and is impressed with how fast the government wants to create rules around the technology.
The wrong conversation is beingfacilitated by Schumer. As generative AI is poised to flood the internet with more—and more convincing—disinformation and misinformation, many AI experts say the top goal of the Senate should be restoring faith in, well, the Senate itself.
Tech companies are happy to speak behind closed doors to policymakers, but some are concerned about the private nature of the forum. The forum was seen as a way for tech giants to influence policies, according to Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Ramayya Krishnan, dean of the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, tells The Verge that other AI Insight Forums have to be public.
“We need more public hearings so we have more transparency into how the regulations are being crafted,” Krishnan said. I hope those forums are open to the public.
Warren and others sent a letter to Artificial Intelligence companies asking about the work conditions of the human workers who help train and moderate models.
When it comes to artificial intelligence, the United States Senators are interested in getting the help of the top executives in Silicon Valley so they can fix a Senate problem which they see as a symptom of a more political class.
Schumer said that the format would not allow Senators to ask questions of the speakers, and that all Senators were encouraged to listen to the discussion.
The Problem of Deep Fakes: How Deep Artificial Intelligence Can Disturbate the Faith in the American Political System and Where Democracy Comes From
“The government is, in my opinion, based on a belief in process over a result—that if the process is equitable, we’ll live with the results, whether you agree with it or not,” says Dan Mintz, chair of the Department of Information Technology at the University of Maryland Global Campus. They don’t believe in the result anymore, and that’s because they don’t believe in the process.
But many politicians haven’t gotten the post-fact memo, which is why most lawmakers are praising Google’s recent announcement that it will require disclosure of “synthetic,” AI-generated content in political ads.
“It’s a real concern. We have to have a way for folks to easily verify that what they’re seeing is reality,” says Michigan senator Gary Peters, head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Can new technology bring about the restoration of faith in the American political system? It’s doubtful. Americans—with unseen assistance from the algorithms that now run our digital lives—increasingly live in different political universes. Some 69 percent of Republicans now believe US president Joe Biden lost in 2020, while upwards of 90 percent of the GOP thinks news outlets intentionally publish lies. Most Democrats think former president Donald Trump was involved in the 2020 election.
“We now truly believe that facts are malleable, and so the ability to move people is becoming more difficult. So I think the big problem of deepfakes is not that it’s going to have this direct impact on the election, it is that it’s going to have an even greater contribution to decreasing the faith of people in institutions,” Mintz says.