To Move Forward with AI, Look to the Fight for Social Media Reform

Camille Carlton is the Senior Policy Manager at Center for Humane Technology, and Jamie Neikrie is the legislative lead for the Council for Responsible Social Media, an initiative of Issue One. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testifies to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology hearing titled “Oversight of A.I.: Rules for Artificial Intelligence,” May 16, 2023. Last week’s Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on Oversight of AI united members across the aisle in a shared sense of urgency — Congress must move quickly to address the new capabilities and threats posed by generative artificial intelligence. Underlying this consensus was the sentiment that we cannot make the same mistakes we made with social media when it comes to AI. As Committee Chair Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) stated in his opening remarks, “Congress failed to meet the moment on social media. Now we have the obligation to do it on AI before the threats and the risks become real.” We have a narrow window before the new wave of generative AI products become so deeply entangled with society, the economy, and politics that they are largely beyond accountability, as social media has become. So how can we keep from repeating history? We have to first look back: in order to understand how AI builds on previous technological advances and to extract key lessons from the push for social media oversight. General Purpose AI, Generative AI, and How We Got Here General purpose AI systems are designed to perform a wide range of tasks….To Move Forward with AI, Look to the Fight for Social Media Reform