In April, lawyers for the airline Avianca noticed something strange.
A passenger, Robert Mata, had sued the airline, alleging that a serving cart on a flight had struck and severely injured his left knee, but several cases cited in Mata’s lawsuit didn’t appear to exist.
The judge couldn’t verify them, either. It turned out that ChatGPT had made them all up, fabricating names and decisions. One of Mata’s lawyers, Steven A. Schwartz, had used the chatbot as an assistant—his first time using the program for legal research—and, as Schwartz wrote in an affidavit, “was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”
The incident was only one in a litany of generative AI-spreading falsehoods, not to mention financial scams, nonconsensual porn, and more.
Tech companies are marketing their AI products and potentially reaping enormous profits, with little accountability or legal oversight for the real-world damage those products can cause.
The federal government is now trying to catch up.
Late last month, the Biden administration announced that seven tech companies at the forefront of AI development had agreed to voluntary commitments to ensure that their products are “safe, secure, and trustworthy.” Those commitments follow a flurry of White House summits on AI, congressional testimonies on regulating the technology, and declarations from various government agencies that they are taking AI seriously.
In the announcement, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and others pledged to subject their products to third-party testing, invest in bias reduction, and be more transparent about their AI systems’ capabilities and limitations.
The language is promising but just a promise, needing more enforcement mechanisms and details about the next steps.
Regulating AI requires a lumbering bureaucracy to take on notoriously secretive companies and rapidly evolving technologies. Much of the Biden administration’s language apes tech…