Efforts to Rein In AI Tap Lesson From Social Media: Don’t Wait Until It’s Too Late

Social media was more than a decade old before efforts to curb its ill effects began in earnest. With artificial intelligence, lawmakers, activists and executives aren’t waiting that long.

Over the past several months, award-winning scientists, White House officials and tech CEOs have called for guardrails around generative AI tools such as ChatGPT—the chatbot launched last year by Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI. Among those at the table are many veterans of the continuing battle to make social media safer.

Those advocates view the AI debate as a fresh chance to influence how companies make and market their products and to shape public expectations of the technology. They aim to move faster to shape the AI landscape and learn from errors in the fight over social media.

“We missed the window on social media,” said Jim Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, a child internet-safety organisation that has for years criticised social-media platforms over issues including privacy and harmful content. “It was late—very late—and the ground rules had already been set and industry just did whatever it wanted to do.”

Activists and executives alike are pushing out a range of projects and proposals to shape understanding and regulation to address issues including AI’s potential for manipulation, misinformation and bias.

Common Sense is developing an independent AI ratings and reviews system that will assess AI products such as ChatGPT on their handling of private data, suitability for children and other factors. The nonprofit plans to launch the system this fall and spend between $5 million and $10 million a year on top of its $25 million budget to fund the project.

Other internet advocacy groups including the Mozilla Foundation are also building their own open-source AI tools and investing in startups that say they are building responsible AI systems. Some firms initially focused on social media are now trying to sell services to AI companies to help their chatbots avoid churning out misinformation and other harmful content.

Tech companies are racing to influence regulation, discussing it with global governments that are both wary of AI and eager to capitalise on its opportunities. In early May, President Biden met with the chief executives of companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Google at the White House. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has spent weeks meeting with lawmakers and other leaders globally to discuss AI’s risks and his company’s idea of safe regulation.

Altman and Microsoft President Brad Smith have both argued for a new regulatory agency that would license large AI systems. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who on Wednesday announced the official launch of his new AI startup, said in May that the government should convene an independent oversight committee, potentially including industry executives, to create rules that ensure AI is developed safely.

The Federal Trade Commission also is taking a hard look at AI. It is investigating whether OpenAI has “engaged in unfair or deceptive practices” stemming from false information published by ChatGPT, according to a civil subpoena made public this past week. Altman said OpenAI is confident that it follows the law and “of course we will work with the FTC.”

Looming large over all this activity is the growing feeling among many activists and lawmakers that years of efforts to regulate or otherwise change social-media companies including Facebook parent Meta Platforms, Twitter and TikTok were unsatisfactory. Facebook was founded in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, but widespread discussion about regulation didn’t really take off until after discoveries of Russian interference and other issues in the 2016 U.S. election.

“Congress failed to meet the moment on social media,” Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal said during a congressional hearing on AI in May. “Now we have the obligation to do it on AI before the threats and the risks become real.”

Though social-media executives in recent years called for more regulation, no new U.S. federal laws have been set that require companies to protect users’ privacy and data or that update the nearly three-decade-old rules for how platforms police content. In part that is because of disagreements among lawmakers over whether companies should do more to moderate what is said on their platforms or whether they already have overstepped into stifling free speech.

Some of the activists who are veterans of those battles say two major lessons from this era are that the companies can’t be trusted to self-regulate and that the federal government is too gridlocked to pass meaningful legislation. “There’s a massive void,” Steyer of Common Sense Media said.

Yet he and others say they are encouraged by the willingness of AI companies to discuss major issues.

“We’re seeing some of the people from trust and safety teams from social media are now at AI companies,” said L. Gordon Crovitz, co-founder of NewsGuard, a company that tracks and rates news sites. Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, says these people seem much more empowered in their current roles. “The body language is ‘we’ve been freed.’”

Large language models such as GPT-4 are trained on anything that can be scraped from the internet, but the data contain large chunks of hate speech, misinformation and other harmful content. So these models are further refined after their initial training to weed out some of that bad content in a process called fine-tuning.

NewsGuard has been talking to AI companies about licensing its data—which Crovitz calls a “catalog of all the important false narratives that are out there”—for fine-tuning and to bolster AI models’ guardrails against producing just those types of misinformation and false narratives.

Ravi Iyer, a former product manager for Meta, is now at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and developing a poll that tracks how people experience AI systems. He hopes the poll will influence how AI companies design and deploy their products.

“We need to know that’s a choice platforms can make and reward them for not making the wrong choices,” Iyer said.

The Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit that builds the Firefox internet browser, said it is building open-sourced models as alternatives to large private AI models. “We need to build alternatives and not just advocate for them,” Mark Surman, Mozilla’s president, said.

Steyer described the AI ratings system being built at Common Sense as the most ambitious in the nonprofit’s history. Tracy Pizzo Frey, a consultant who previously worked for Google and is helping craft the system, said there is no set way to evaluate the safety of AI tools.

So far, Common Sense is looking at seven factors, including how transparent companies are about what their systems can do and where they still have shortcomings. The nonprofit may factor in how much information companies provide about their training data, which companies including OpenAI view as competitive secrets.

Frey said Common Sense won’t ask for proprietary data but needs information that helps parents and educators make informed decisions about the use of AI. “There are no rules around what transparency looks like,” Frey said.

Gold is one of the market’s go-to hedges in rocky times. Don’t forget that gold miners’ stocks are too.

The stock market’s gains in 2026 belie the rocky macroeconomic picture: elevated inflation, heightened geopolitical tensions, and jitters about the artificial-intelligence trade. That backdrop, in theory, should be the time for gold to shine. Instead, the price of the yellow metal has tumbled more than 5% so far, after last year’s blistering 65% rally. In part, the U.S. dollar’s recovery has stymied gold, which benefited from the greenback’s weakness in 2025.

Even with the precious metal’s recent weakness, gold mining stocks could be the best way to profit from this year’s uncertainty.

Gold miners “are a valuable hedge against macro risks that would likely be damaging for equities,” BCA Research’s Noah Weisberger and Rishabh Shah wrote this week.

Concerns about the Federal Reserve’s next moves to tackle inflation, the increasingly crowded AI trade, and steep valuations for tech stocks are just some of the drivers that could help gold’s price get on even footing— and lead to even bigger gains for miner stocks.

These stocks’ prices tend to outpace gold’s moves, because the companies have fixed operational costs. So when gold’s price rallies, their profit margins soar, and vice versa. For instance, the VanEck Gold Miners GDX +7.39% exchange-traded fund has fallen 11% this year as the metal has slumped.

Now, gold’s price just needs to stabilize to help miners’ stocks take off, and that seems to be happening. The precious metal has recently found support above the $4,000 level, and has stuck in a narrow range since the end of June. But its price rose ever so slightly in July, ending a four-month losing streak for the metal. Technical analysis also suggests that gold is due for a comeback.

Barron’s recently wrote that the pullbacks for both gold miners and the metal itself are overdone. Senior technical analyst Doug Busch noted that the VanEck ETF is on the “verge of a breakout” and has the potential to hit $11o in early 2027, up more than 40% from its current price.

Gold miners also have more than their role as a market hedge going for them. Their fundamentals are solid, too, says Chris Mancini, portfolio co-manager of the Gabelli Gold Fund.

“Precious metals miners are generating substantial amounts of free cash flow given profit margins of over $2,000 per ounce, and are returning this cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends,” he said in an email.

“Buying the miners is a cheap way to get exposure to the price of gold,” he added. His fund owns Newmont NEM +6.71%, a Barron’s stock pick last year, and Agnico Eagle Mines as top holdings, as well as miners Northern Star Resources, Endeavour Mining, and Kinross Gold K+8.59%.

Miners are better businesses than they used to be, the BCA team added.

“Capex is more disciplined, margins are high and rising…and they are largely independent of the AI story,” Weisberger, BCA’s head of equities, and Shah, a senior analyst, wrote.

That last part is key. AI is disrupting the software industry and many other services and information-oriented businesses, and investors have piled into AI stocks. But ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and other large-language models aren’t going to replace the need to mine for metals.

“Equity portfolios can benefit from exposure to quality that is uncorrelated to AI risk, and gold miners fit the bill,” the BCA team said.

They recommend that investors buy the VanEck Gold Miners ETF, which owns top miners such as Agnico, Barrick Mining ABX +7.24%, and Newmont.

An important bonus for big gold miners’ stocks is that their valuations are attractive after the gold’s pullback, too. The VanEck ETF is now trading at just a little more than nine times next year’s earnings estimates. That’s a big discount to its five-year average price-to-earnings ratio of 14, according to FactSet.

What’s more, the ETF is currently valued at a more than 50% discount to the S&P 500 SPX -0.17%, which is trading for about 19 times earnings estimates for 2027. Mining stocks have typically traded at just a 25% discount to the broader market over the past five years. So there is significant upside for the group if valuations move back toward normal levels.

One factor that complicates mining stocks as a market hedge, of course, is if stocks bounce back, which has been the case so far in August.

But both the market and economic outlooks remain cloudy, and investors remain nervous about the Fed’s next moves and AI stocks. Gold miners should do just fine, even if the anxious mood on Wall Street persists.

Efforts to Rein In AI Tap Lesson From Social Media: Don’t Wait Until It’s Too Late

Activists and officials race to shape rules and public understanding of new artificial intelligence tools