Calls for governments to regulate artificial intelligence go way back OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022. But officials have not offered an approach to manage AI’s potential to enable mass surveillance, exacerbate long-standing inequalities, or put humans at physical risk. With these challenges looming, the sudden emergence of so-called generative AI – systems like chatbots that create content themselves – introduces a host of new ones.
“We need to regulate this, we need laws,” says Janet Haven, executive director of Data & Society, a nonprofit research organization in New York. “The idea that tech companies can build whatever they want and release it to the world and society scrambles to adapt and make room for that thing is backwards.”