From WIRED
Generative AI Learned Nothing From Web 2.0
By Vittoria Elliott
If 2022 was the year the generative AI boom started, 2023 was the year of the generative AI panic. Just over 12 months since OpenAI released ChatGPT and set a record for the fastest-growing consumer product, it appears to have also helped set a record for fastest government intervention in a new technology. The US Federal Elections Commission is looking into deceptive campaign ads, Congress is calling for oversight into how AI companies develop and label training data for their algorithms, and the European Union passed its new AI Act with last-minute tweaks to respond to generative AI.
But for all the novelty and speed, generative AI’s problems are also painfully familiar. OpenAI and its rivals racing to launch new AI models are facing problems that have dogged social platforms, that earlier era-shaping new technology, for nearly two decades. Companies like Meta never did get the upper hand over mis- and disinformation, sketchy labor practices, and nonconsensual pornography, to name just a few of their unintended consequences. Now those issues are gaining a challenging new life, with an AI twist.
“These are completely predictable problems,” says Hany Farid, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, of the headaches faced by OpenAI and others. “I think they were preventable...”
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
