RALPH NADER: The Frankenstein chatbots are erupting

Rick Claypool is a level-headed policy analyst and numbers-cruncher for Public Citizen, a man known for reporting the decline in corporate crime enforcement with each succeeding presidency. His latest report (with Cheyenne Hunt) clearly shows him in an unusually agitated state. Its title is “Sorry in Advance! Rapid Rush to Deploy Generative A.I. Risks a Wide Array of Automated Harms.”

Claypool is not engaging in hyperbole or horrible hypotheticals concerning chatbots controlling humanity. He is extrapolating from what is already starting to happen in almost every sector of our society.

I challenge you to read his report without experiencing cognitive dissonance and throwing up your hands thinking the genie is already out of a million bottles. Claypool takes you through “… real-world harms [that] the rush to release and monetize these tools can cause — and, in many cases, is already causing.”

Claypool’s analysis takes you through five broad areas of concern, excluding the horrific autonomous weapons the Department of Defense is deeply involved in developing. The various section titles of his report foreshadow the coming abuses: “Damaging Democracy,” “Consumer Concerns,” “Worsening Inequality,” “Undermining Worker Rights,” and “Environmental Concerns.”

Before he gets specific, Claypool previews his conclusion: “Until meaningful government safeguards are in place to protect the public from the harms of generative A.I., we need a pause.” Just how, he doesn’t say. Because with so many increasing generators of these chatbots around the world, this flood of Frankenstein chatbots may present a problem the dean of the Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound, described regarding the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the 1920s as being beyond “the limits of effective legal action.”

Claypool quotes Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who released last November the shocking ChatGPT A.I. product, saying afterward: “I think we are potentially not that far away from potentially scary ones.” Altman has been busy up on Capitol Hill mesmerizing legislators by saying “regulation is needed” by which he means the industry itself writing the rules and standards for Congress.

Using its existing authority, the Federal Trade Commission, in the author’s words “… has already warned that generative A.I. tools are powerful enough to create synthetic content — plausible sounding news stories, authoritative-looking academic studies, hoax images, and deepfake videos — and that this synthetic content is becoming difficult to distinguish from authentic content.” He adds that “…these tools are easy for just about anyone to use.”

There is no end to the predicted disasters, both from people inside the industry and its outside critics. Destruction of livelihoods, harmful health impacts from promotion of quack remedies, financial fraud, political and electoral fakeries, stripping of the information commons, subversion of the open internet, faking your facial image, voice, words, and behavior, tricking you and others with lies every day. AI’s potential for deception will make Fox News’ deceptions look comparatively restrained.

With Congress and the White House issuing unenforceable exhortations to the industry to be nice, safe and responsible, critics are looking to the European Union’s first stage passage of an A.I. Act to protect its people from the more overt damages to their common and individual rights and interests.

The act’s focus is on which uses of A.I. need to be curbed, including the adverse impact on elections. It mandates the labeling of A.I.-generated content.

All legislative bodies will have to confront the barriers of secrecy — claims by governments on weapons and surveillance development and the already asserted “trade secrets” by corporations. In the U.S., there also will be First Amendment defenses for free speech by these artificial entities called corporations. Their corporate lawyers will have a lucrative field day concocting delays and obstructions.

Our nation and the world are barely organized enough to control through treaties the use of nuclear weapons — through treaties, poorly prepared for devastating pandemics, and virtually nowhere in foreseeing and forestalling the mega-threats of generative A.I. “to society and humanity.” Those were the words of an open warning letter calling for a six-month pause, signed by top CEOs, technologists and academics.

With few exceptions, a lazy Congress, readying for a long July 4th holiday break followed by taking off all of August for a congressional recess, is oblivious to its special powers and duties to the American people. Let’s see some congressional urgency to put some specificity and enforcement teeth behind and beyond Biden’s nonbinding “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights” published by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in October 2022.

For now, I have two recommendations. Demand your Senators and Representatives join you for local town meetings during Congress’s August recess where you and your lawmakers can listen to each other and address the pressing issues. Tell them that this run-away robotic juggernaut is stripping humans of their own mental identities, autonomy and self-reliant judgments.

Everyone is at risk. Even Microsoft and Google have little idea of the whirlwind they are unleashing, driven by short-sighted profits, not wisdom, civic principles and accountabilities to public institutions and the people themselves.

Then demand that your members of Congress end their three-day-a-week work routine and conduct rigorous hearings in D.C. and around the country with a deadline for passing legislation. Tell them they, too, are at risk for the fakery, slander, and imitations of the chatbots.

Lastly, upgrade and make more precise your skepticism toward the chatbots already entering and affecting your lives and localities. Be on guard and develop an ever-larger circle of trusting relatives, friends, neighbors and coworkers.

The corporate chatbots are coming on fast without any legal or ethical frameworks to restrain and discipline them from subverting your freedoms and true sense of realities.