Reported by Tim Wu

When President Biden signed his sweeping executive order on artificial intelligence last week, he joked about the strange experience of watching a “deep fake” of himself, saying, “When the hell did I say that?”

The anecdote was significant, for it linked the executive order to an actual A.I. harm that everyone can understand — human impersonation.

Mr. Biden’s executive order outdoes even the Europeans by considering just about every potential risk one could imagine, from everyday fraud to the development of weapons of mass destruction. The order develops standards for A.I. safety and trustworthiness, establishes a cybersecurity program to develop A.I. tools and requires companies developing A.I. systems that could pose a threat to national security to share their safety test results with the federal government.

While A.I. certainly poses problems and challenges that call for government action, the apocalyptic concerns — be they mass unemployment from automation or a superintelligent A.I. that seeks to exterminate humanity — remain in the realm of speculation.

But the truth is that no one knows if any of these world-shattering developments will come to pass. Technological predictions are not like those of climate science, with a relatively limited number of parameters.

To regulate speculative risks, rather than actual harms, would be unwise, for two reasons. First, overeager regulators can fixate shortsightedly on the wrong target of regulation. For example, to address the dangers of digital piracy, Congress in 1992 extensively regulated digital audio tape, a recording format now remembered only by audio nerds, thanks to the subsequent rise of the internet and MP3s. Similarly, today’s policymakers are preoccupied with large language models like ChatGPT, which could be the future of everything — or, given their gross unreliability stemming from chronic falsification and fabrication, may end up remembered as the Hula Hoop of the A.I. age.

Second, pre-emptive regulation can erect barriers to entry for companies interested in breaking into an industry. Established players, with millions of dollars to spend on lawyers and experts, can find ways of abiding by a complex set of new regulations, but smaller start-ups typically don’t have the same resources. This fosters monopolization and discourages innovation. The tech industry is already too much the dominion of a handful of huge companies. The strictest regulation of A.I. would result in having only companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple and their closest partners competing in this area. It may not be a coincidence that those companies and their partners have been the strongest advocates of A.I. regulation.

Actual harm, not imagined risk, is a far better guide to how and when the state should intervene. A.I.’s clearest extant harms are those related to human impersonation (such as the fake nudes), discrimination and the addiction of young people. In 2020, thieves used an impersonated human voice to swindle a Japanese company in Hong Kong out of $35 million. Facial recognition technology has led to wrongful arrest and imprisonment, as in the case of Nijeer Parks, who spent 10 days in a New Jersey jail because he was misidentified. Fake consumer reviews have eroded consumer confidence, and the fake social media accounts drive propaganda. A.I.-powered algorithms are used to enhance the already habit-forming properties of social media.

Read full report: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/opinion/biden-ai-regulation.html