How Do Policymakers Solve a Problem Like ChatGPT?

The rise of chatbots is an added challenge to officials trying to develop rules for Al

- Lucy Papachristou and Jillian Deutsch

Calls for governments to regulate artificial intelligence far predate OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in late 2022. But officials haven’t come up with an approach to deal with AI’s potential to enable mass surveillance, exacerbate long-standing inequities or put humans in physical danger. With those challenges looming, the sudden emergence of so-called generative AI—systems such as chatbots that create content on their own—is presenting a host of new ones.

“We need to regulate this, we need laws,” says Janet Haven, executive director of Data & Society, a nonprofit research organization in New York. “The idea that tech companies get to build whatever they want and release it into the world and society scrambles to adjust and make way for that thing is backwards.”