Falling in love with a chatbot
Who's going to rescue you?
Platform liability is a hot topic. As we stand today in the United States, platforms operate behind an immunity shield created by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. With very few exceptions, platforms are not liable for user-generated content. In practical terms, they have been able to succeed in most cases brought against them and our precedent-based judicial system makes this a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Enters generative AI. Should it be regulated, and should tech companies continue to enjoy the same protections? At their current stage of development, generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) go beyond curating user-generated content, they, can hallucinate coming up with responses that are not justifiable based on their training data sets.
Moreover, the person guiding the conversation – the human on this side of the chat – can coax the model into specific directions. Prompt engineers represent an emerging, and well-remunerated, profession that does just that.
As technology evolves and becomes more human-like we could see people developing a personal attachment to AI and this could lead to emotional harm (not too far-fetched an idea as described in the article from this link). Those who interact the most with the tool could be the first to be affected.
In this scenario and back to the liability question, who is responsible: the prompt engineer who “tuned” the model to produce a given effect, the model itself, or the platform? Being on the front lines, the engineer can be a victim and a perpetrator at the same time.
This simple example shows the complexity of the theme and how imperfect the current regulatory framework is to deal with these issues. While other countries are taking decisive steps to codify AI Ethics and design principles and mechanisms for regulation, we seem to continue to wait until something bad happens.
The time has arrived for us to establish the protective guardrails.
Today I have asked Google Bard for their opinion:
This article represents my personal views. It does not represent the views of any companies I have been or am presently affiliated with.