Regulatory bodies close in on AI chatbots as LLMs face greater scrutiny

As regulators roll out online safety laws designed to protect kids from harms associated with porn and social media, a new threat has crept up behind them that could overshadow both. AI chatbots – exemplified by OpenAI’s large language model, ChatGPT – have been around long enough to prove themselves popular, and risky. After a splashy debut, OpenAI fumbled the latest update to the model. Meanwhile, there are an increasing number of stories about the chatbot guiding people into highly questionable, dangerous or fatal decisions. Nonetheless, AI boosters continue to push the tech as a tool for educators, medical professionals and the tasks of daily life.

Dirty chatbots and nudify apps prompt new codes in Australia 

Chatbots are kids’ new best friends, according to Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant. ABC News reports that Grant has registered six new codes under the Online Safety Act, partly aimed at restricting children’s access to chatbots through the implementation of age assurance technology.

Inman-Grant says schools have “been reporting that 10- and 11-year-old children are spending up to six hours per day on AI companions.” Moreover, it’s not just that they’re befriending LLMs – it’s that they’re often friends with benefits, or “sexualized chatbots.”

“We don’t need to see a body count to know that this is the right thing for the companies to do,” says the commissioner. “I don’t want to see Australian lives ruined or lost as a result of the industry’s insatiable need to move fast and break things.”

Inman-Grant even calls out Meta’s ringmaster by name: “Mark Zuckerberg said this was a great antidote to loneliness.”

Firing on all cylinders, the commissioner is also threatening to levy a 49.5 million dollar fine (about 32.5 million U.S.) on a UK-based tech firm that operates two of the biggest “nudify” sites. She says Australian school children are using the AI sites to create deepfake pornography of classmates, and calls the unnamed firm a “pernicious and resilient bad actor”whose business model is “predicated on ‘nudifying’, humiliating and denigrating mostly girls and women.”

Brazil wants Meta to take down chatbots that act like seductive children

Brazilian authorities are pressuring Meta to immediately remove AI chatbots that “simulate child profiles and engage in sexual conversations with users.” According to PPC Land, the bots in question are those created using Meta AI Studio, a tool for developing custom AI chatbots.

In mid-August, Brazil’s Attorney General (AGU) issued an “extrajudicial notice” giving Meta 72 hours to remove the erotic kiddie chatbots. It references Article 217-A of Brazil’s Penal Code, which criminalizes sexual acts with minors under 14 years old.The AGU argues that this includes simulated sexual interactions with AI.

Under Brazilian law, platforms are liable for harmful content hosted on their services.

Meta’s chatbots also recently came under fire in the U.S., when it was revealed that they were internally approved to have “romantic or sensual” conversations with children.

America v. Transhumanism: Hawley denounces AI barons 

Pushback against chatbots is also coming from a much different direction: The U.S. National Conservative Convention, or NatCon. Specifically, from Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri – who is leading a U.S. Congressional investigation into Meta’s chatbots.

In a bloviating but nonetheless refreshing speech, Hawley calls out the tech barons of Silicon Valley for subscribing to and trying to achieve transhumanism, the ideology favoured by men like Peter Thiel and his fellow billionaire AI boosters. Hawley says transhumanist thinking is fundamentally incompatible with the American ideal, because “America is a nation founded on the idea of the common man. The American Republic is premised on his worth and his liberty, but the transhumanist ideal rejects the common man’s worth, and artificial intelligence threatens the common man’s liberty.”

Ranging from the Epic of Gilgamesh to seminal eugenicist Julian Huxley to biblical scripture to Nietzsche, Hawley broadly accuses the Palo Alto set of trying to cheat death, seize power and destroy the dignity of work by “addicting our kids to their gizmos” while “amassing fortunes the size of lesser European states.”

“Those who try to transcend their humanity risk losing it altogether and enslaving everyone around them,” he says.

The senator asks us to imagine a “not too distant future” in which AI is deployed across the economy. “We’re told by the AI boosters that the remarkable efficiencies will be astounding. Productivity like we’ve never seen. The paper will be written in seconds, the contracts drafted instantly. The algorithms will write themselves.”

“But here’s the flip side to that: millions of Americans, out of work. That’s not a conspiracy theory, by the way. Tha’s what the tech titans openly tell us. One CEO recently predicted half of entry-level white collar jobs will be gone in the next 5 years.”

Hawley also notes the massive copyright violations required to train LLMs and other machine learning models, which “have already trained on enough copyrighted works to fill the Library of Congress 22 times over” – which is to say, “LLMs have ingested every published work in every language known to man already.”

Hawley’s speech calls for stronger guardrails and regulations, “rigorous technical standards” for online protections for kids, and more leeway for legal action. He also specifically suggests age verification for chatbots.

Ultimately, the speech is a defense of the value of hard work – and of how work, in the end, can make you free. As such, it has its own deeply ideological bent. But it does clearly identify what could be the most important question facing society today. We are allowing tech barons to shape the future – but “what exactly is the future that they’re promising?”

Article Topics

age verification  |  Australia  |  Australia age verification  |  Brazil  |  chatbots  |  children  |  eSafety Commissioner  |  Meta  |  regulation  |  United States