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.

Former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu delivered a warning to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a recent visit to Washington: Already-high airfares will surge if the war in Iran doesn’t end soon.

Sununu, a Republican who represents some of the biggest airlines as president of the industry group Airlines for America, has for weeks sounded the alarm to Trump administration officials about the economic fallout from high jet fuel prices. The war, Sununu has argued, must come to a close soon, or things will get worse.

Administration officials have gotten the message.

Privately, President Trump’s advisers are increasingly worried that Republicans will pay a political price for the rising fuel costs, according to people familiar with the matter. Many of those advisers are eager to end the war, hoping prices will begin to moderate before November’s midterm elections.

The fallout from the U.S.-Israeli attack in late February has slowed traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane, triggering a sharp increase in oil, gasoline and jet-fuel prices.

That means consumers are grappling with high costs ahead of the summer travel season, as they consider vacation plans.

Sixty-three per cent of Americans said they put a great deal or a good amount of blame on Trump for the increase in gas prices, according to a new poll conducted by NPR, PBS and Marist.

More than 8 in 10 Americans said struggles at the gas pump are putting strain on their finances.

Jet-fuel prices roughly doubled in a matter of weeks after the war began, and they have remained high. Airlines have said that will add billions of dollars of additional expenses this year, squeezing profit margins.

U.S. airlines spent more than $5 billion on fuel in March—up 30% from a year earlier, according to government data.

Carriers have been raising ticket prices, hoping to pass the cost along to consumers, and they are culling flights that will no longer make money at higher price levels.

In March, the price of a U.S. domestic round-trip economy ticket rose 21% from a year earlier to $570, according to Airlines Reporting Corp., which tracks travel-agency sales.

So far, airlines have said the higher fares haven’t deterred bookings and they are hoping to recoup more of the fuel-cost increases as the year goes on.

Earlier this week, Trump said the current price of oil is “a very small price to pay for getting rid of a nuclear weapon from people that are really mentally deranged.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that if Iran got a nuclear weapon, the country would have more leverage to keep the strait closed and “make our gas prices like $9 a gallon or $8 a gallon.”

Trump has taken steps in recent days to bring the war to an end. Late Tuesday, the president paused a plan to help guide trapped commercial ships out of the Strait of Hormuz, expressing optimism that a deal could be reached with Iran to end the conflict.

Crude oil prices fell below $100 a barrel on Wednesday, after reports that Iran and the U.S. are working with mediators on a one-page framework to restart negotiations aimed at ending the conflict and opening the strait.

Sununu said Trump administration officials are conscious of the economic fallout from the war: “They get it…and I think that’s why they’re trying to get through the war as fast as they can.”

But he cautioned that it could take months for prices to return to prewar levels.

“Ticket prices won’t go down immediately” after the strait is fully reopened, Sununu said. “You’re looking at elevated ticket prices through the summer and fall because it takes a while for the prices to go down.”

Since the initial U.S.-Israeli attack in late February, Sununu has met in Washington with National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, representatives from the Transportation Department and senior White House officials.

A White House official confirmed that Hassett and Sununu have discussed the effect of increased fuel prices on the airline industry. The official said the conversation touched on how the industry can mitigate the impact of high jet fuel prices on consumers.

“The president and his entire energy team anticipated these short-term disruptions to the global energy markets from Operation Epic Fury and had a plan prepared to mitigate these disruptions,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said, pointing to the administration’s decision to waive a century-old shipping law in a bid to lower the cost of moving oil.

Rogers said the administration is working with industry representatives to “address their concerns, explore potential actions, and inform the president’s policy decisions.”

A Treasury Department spokesman pointed to Bessent’s recent comments on Fox News that the U.S. economy remains strong despite price increases. The spokesman said Treasury officials have met with airline executives, who have reaffirmed strong ticket bookings.

“We’re cognizant that this short-term move up in prices is affecting the American people, but I am also confident, on the other side of this, prices will come down very quickly,” Bessent told Fox News on Monday.

The war has already contributed to one casualty in the industry: Spirit Airlines. Company representatives have said they were forced to close the airline because the sustained surge in jet-fuel prices derailed the company’s plan to emerge from chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The Trump administration and Spirit failed to come to an agreement for the company to receive a financial lifeline of as much as $500 million from the federal government.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has argued that the Iran war wasn’t the cause of Spirit’s demise, pointing to the company’s past financial struggles, as well as the Biden administration’s decision to challenge a merger with JetBlue.

Other budget airlines have also turned to the federal government for help since the U.S.-Israeli attack. A group of budget airlines last month sought $2.5 billion in financial assistance to offset higher fuel costs, and they separately wrote to lawmakers asking for relief from certain ticket taxes.

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

Administration officials have spoken to the airline industry, which has voiced concerns about the rising costs.