The release of the ChatGPT chatbot this year has led to increased debate about AI and the government’s role with the technology. Because AI can generate human-like writing and fake images, there are ethical and societal concerns.OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, has been secretive about the data its AI systems have been trained upon.
Companies worried about being liable for something in their training data might also not have incentives to properly track it, said Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face. “I think it might not be possible for OpenAI to actually detail all of its training data at a level of detail that would be really useful in terms of some of the concerns around consent and privacy and licensing,” Mitchell said in an interview Tuesday. “From what I know of tech culture, that just isn’t done.”
Theoretically, at least, some kind of disclosure law could force AI providers to open up their systems to more third-party scrutiny. But with AI systems being built atop previous models, it won’t be easy for companies to provide greater transparency after the fact. “I think it’s really going to be up to the governments to decide whether this means that you have to trash all the work you’ve done or not,” Mitchell said. “Of course, I kind of imagine that at least in the U.S., the decisions will lean towards the corporations and be supportive of the fact that it’s already been done. It would have such massive ramifications if all these companies had to essentially trash all of this work and start over.