ChatGPT Advances Are Moving So Fast Regulators Can’t Keep Up
As governments try to figure out how to regulate artificial intelligence, the latest developments add new challenges.
Calls for governments to regulate artificial intelligence far predate OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in late 2022. But officials haven’t come up with an approach to deal with AI’s potential to enable mass surveillance, exacerbate long-standing inequities or put humans in physical danger. With those challenges looming, the sudden emergence of so-called generative AI—systems such as chatbots that create content on their own—is presenting 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 get to build whatever they want and release it into the world and society scrambles to adjust and make way for that thing is backwards.”