Artificial Intelligence: Where are we going? What do we really need to hear from the tech world? What have we learned in a bipartisan AI Insight Forum?

The Senate conducted a forum to inform on potential rulemaking and tech leaders called for regulation that balances innovation and safety.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer invited leaders in the area of artificial intelligence to a bipartisan forum.

US lawmakers have been talking about regulating the tech. The Judiciary Committee had a hearing about legislation relating to Artificial Intelligence on the day before the forum. Congress holds hearings on a wide range of topics around Artificial Intelligence regulation. The White House also got voluntary commitments from AI companies to develop AI responsibly.

Meta builds safeguards into its generative AI models and is deliberate about how to roll out AI-powered products. The company believes artificial intelligence is going to be an important driver of opportunity in the future.

On the other hand, Musk told reporters after the forum that the government needs a federal oversight agency for artificial intelligence.

Smaller companies may be left behind in the wake of Big Tech companies wanting regulation as concerns over regulatory capture rose.

Schumer is facilitating the wrong conversation. As generative artificial intelligence floods the internet with more and more fake stories, many experts think the Senate should try to restore faith in it.

But while tech companies welcomed the opportunity to speak behind closed doors to policymakers, others expressed concern about the private nature of the forum. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) criticized the forum, saying it was a way for tech giants to influence policies.

Ramayya Krishnan, dean of the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, tells The Verge that other AI Insight Forums have to be public.

There should be more public hearings so that we can know how the regulations are being crafted. I would like to see other forums open to the public.

Warren and the other lawmakers sent a letter to large Artificial Intelligence companies, asking them about the working conditions of the human workers who train and moderate the models.

Facts are increasingly a quaint notion fading in our collective rearview. In the past few elections, the truth we want—whether myth, reality, or a hodgepodge of the two—has been a couple of clicks away in the recesses of the web. generative AI is only able to help politicians make believable fictions that appeal to our biases and not the darker uses of tech in our social media feeds.

Deep Fakes: When Social Media Starts to Perturbate the Reality of the 21st Century and the Future is Coming to an End

The format of the discussion will not allow senators to give comments or ask questions of the speaker, according to a notice from Chuck Schumer.

The chair of the University of Maryland’s Department of Information Technology said that the government believes in process over result, and that if it is equitable, they’ll live with the results. People do not believe in the process and they do not believe in the result.

But many politicians haven’t gotten the post-fact memo, which is why most lawmakers are praising Google’s recent announcement that it will require disclosure of “synthetic,” AI-generated content in political ads.

It is a real concern. Gary Peters, head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, says they need to have a way for people to easily verify what they are seeing.

Does new technology have the ability to restore faith in the American political system? Doubtful. Americans are increasingly living in different political worlds thanks to the help given to them from the digital lives that run our lives. Over 90 percent of the GOP thinks news outlets are lying about the president, while 69 percent think Joe Biden lost in 2020. On the other side, 85 percent of Democrats think former president Donald Trump is guilty of interfering with the 2020 election.

“We now truly believe that facts are malleable, and so the ability to move people is becoming more difficult. So I think the big problem of deepfakes is not that it’s going to have this direct impact on the election, it is that it’s going to have an even greater contribution to decreasing the faith of people in institutions,” Mintz says.