Be Careful What You Wish For
🚀 What’s happening: The Biden Administration just signed an Executive Order, finally putting some long overdue guardrails around AI. But as the famous saying goes, be careful what you wish for.
How did we get here?
For about a year, Congress (you know, the people that actually are supposed to make the laws) has been bickering back and forth about what to do with artificial intelligence.
They have held hearings and currently even have a few bills drawn up, but nothing can seem to get any momentum yet (which is… so on brand for Congress). Given that they still haven’t done anything about protecting our kids from social media, we aren’t holding our breath on AI.
So what happened?
Whether you think the Biden Administration was tired of waiting for Congress to act, or just wanted to seize a moment for some sort of positive press… an Executive Order was signed to create a framework of rules that the industry will have to follow (as an aside, Executive Orders basically have the same legal authority as a law, they can just be reversed by any President with a stroke of the pen).
What’s in it?
The text is vague, but there are some positives and negatives to the 8 broad principles it lays out (you can read the full text here).
Positives
We liked the requirement of government agencies to come up with a labeling system to help people determine if an image or text was created by AI or a human.
We also liked that the order promised to enforce consumer protection laws creating penalties for any violation of privacy or personal data.
Negatives
There was no guidance on how copyright or other forms of intellectual property will apply, and this will be a mess for the courts to figure out.
Also, the order promotes close collaboration between the private sector and the government as new applications are developed (not sure how we feel about this one tbh).
Where does that leave us?
Ultimately, Congress is going to have to get their act together and do something with a bit more teeth as we are behind other nations (EU is set to finalize regulation this year) and this technology will only get more and more advanced.
Oh… and in the meantime, Elon Musk still thinks that AI could take over humanity, so there’s that.
👪 Closer to home: While we hoped we would get some AI regulation, we are now a bit cautious knowing that the devil is in the details of how this all gets implemented. It will likely fall on local government agencies to make a lot of judgement calls (which to us sounds like there is a lot of room for error).
The AI space is likely going to continue to evolve much faster than the government is able to keep up, which means that we as parents all need to learn as best we can to stay ahead.
Doing some reading, investigating, and most importantly talking to your kids about it around the dinner table can all be great ways to learn.
Here are some further resources we created to help:
