Is AI Better Regulated After the White House Meeting?

 

The easy answer is, it's too soon to tell.  But for a number of reasons, the July 21 meeting between President Biden and leaders of seven Big Tech firms, including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, may prove to be more show than substance.

 

Admittedly, there is widespread agreement that some sort of regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) should be considered.  Even industry leaders such as Elon Musk have been warning that things are moving too fast, and there are small but real risks of huge catastrophes lurking out there that could be averted by agreed-upon restrictions or regulations of the burgeoning AI industry.

 

Last Friday's White House meeting of representatives from seven leading AI firms—Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta (formerly Facebook), Microsoft, and OpenAI—produced a "fact sheet" that listed eight bullet-point commitments made by the participants.  The actual meeting was not open to the public, but one presumes the White House would not publish such things without at least the passive approval of the participants. 

 

Browsing through the items, I don't see many things that a prudent giant AI corporation wouldn't be doing already.  For example, take "The companies commit to internal and external security testing of their AI systems before their release."  Not to do any security testing would be foolish.  External testing, meaning testing by third-party security firms, is probably pretty common in the industry already, although not universal. 

 

The same thing goes for the commitment to "facilitating third-party discovery and reporting of vulnerabilities in their AI systems."  No tech firm worth its salt is going to ignore an outsider's legitimate report of finding a weak spot in their products, and so this is again something that the firms are probably doing already. 

 

The most technical commitment, but again one that the companies are probably doing already, is to "protect proprietary and unreleased model weights."  Unversed as I am at AI technicalities, I'm not sure exactly what this means, but the model weights appear to be something like the keys to how a given AI system runs once it's been trained, and so it only stands to reason that the companies would protect assets that cost them a lot of computing time to obtain, even before the White House told them to do that.

 

Four bullet points address "Earning the Public's Trust," which, incidentally, implies that the firms have a considerable way to go to earn it.  But we'll let that pass. 

 

The firms commit to developing some way of watermarking or otherwise indicating when "content is AI generated."  That's all very well, but the answer to such a question is rarely just yes or no.  What if some private citizen takes a watermarked AI product and incorporates it manually into something else that is no longer watermarked?  The intention is good, but the path to execution is foggy, to say the least.

 

Perhaps the commitment with the most bite is this one:  "The companies commit to publicly reporting their AI systems’ capabilities, limitations, and areas of appropriate and inappropriate use."  The wording is broad enough to drive a truck through, although again, the intention is good.  How often, how detailed, and how extensive such reports may be is left up to the company.

 

The last two public-trust items commit the firms to "prioritizing" research into the societal risks of AI, and to use AI to address "society's greatest challenges."  If I decide not to wash my car today, I have prioritized washing my car—negatively, it is true, but hey, I said I'd prioritize it!

 

So what is different about the way these firms will carry out their AI activities after the White House meeting?  A lot of good intentions were aired, and if the firms happened to enjoy a lot of public trust in the first place, these good intentions might have found an audience who believes that they will be carried out.

 

But the atmosphere of cynicism which has gradually encroached on almost all areas of public life make such an eventuality unlikely, to say the least.  And this cynicism has arisen due in no small part to the previous doings of the aforementioned Big Tech firms—specifically, their activities in social media.

 

When you compare the health of what you might call the body politic of the United States today with what it was say, fifty years ago, the comparison is breathtaking.  In 1973, 42% of those U. S. residents surveyed said they had either a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in Congress.  Only 16% said they had "very little" confidence.  In 2023, the number of people with either a great deal or quite a lot of confidence is only 8%, and fully 48% say they have "very little" confidence in Congress.  While this trend has been happening for years, much of it has occurred only since 2018, after the social-media phenomenon overtook legacy media as the main conduit of political information exchange—if one can call it that.

 

Never mind what AI may do in the future.  We are standing in the wreckage of something it has done already:  it has caused great and perhaps permanent damage to the primary means by which a nation has of governing itself.  Not AI alone, to be sure, but AI has played an essential role in the way companies have profited from encouraging the worst in people. 

 

It would be nice if last Friday's White House meeting triggered a revolution in the way Big Tech uses AI and its other boxes of tricks to encourage genuine human flourishing without the horrific side effects in both personal lives and in public institutions that we have seen already.  But getting some CEOs in a private room with the President and issuing a nice-sounding press release afterwards isn't likely to do that.  It's a step in the right direction, but a step so tiny that it's almost not worth talking about. 

 

Historically, needed technical regulations have come about only when vivid, graphic, and (usually) sudden harm has been caused.  The kinds of damage AI can do are rarely that striking, so we may have to wait quite a while before meaningful AI regulations are even considered.  But in my view, it was already high time years ago.

 

Sources:  The White House press release on the July 21 meeting of AI firms with President Biden can be found at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/07/21/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-secures-voluntary-commitments-from-leading-artificial-intelligence-companies-to-manage-the-risks-posed-by-ai/.  I also referred to a PBS report on the meeting at

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-biden-announces-ai-safeguards-after-meeting-with-tech-leaders.  The Gallup poll historical data on confidence in Congress can be found at

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx.

Finding Drones in Peace and War

 

DJI, the world's largest drone maker, has announced that it is stopping all shipments of new products to both Ukraine and Russia.  The Verge reported this on Apr. 27 following earlier stories that Russian troops were using a drone-tracking technology called AeroScope to locate Ukrainian drone pilots flying commercial drones that had been converted to combat use.  And last week, the White House announced that it was asking Congress to pass laws making it easier for government agencies to detect and track drones.

 

Drones, more formally known as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), have changed from super-expensive military-only devices a couple of decades ago into popular consumer and professional products today.  Advances in software and hardware have led to over two million drone users in the U. S. alone, and the repurposing of consumer drones for military uses both by guerilla groups and defenders of the Ukraine. 

 

Most drones are not autonomous, but controlled from the ground by means of a radio link.  The radio link is the means by which both the controller and other parties can locate and track the drone.  In anticipation of the time when radio identification of drones would become a government requirement, in 2017 DJI began to include a signal broadcast from every drone they made which provides the drone's "position, altitude, speed, direction, serial number, and the location of the pilot."  This data is unencrypted, meaning that anyone with the proper receiver can pick it up. 

 

DJI also conveniently made available a system called AeroScope, which can receive this data and provide a readout of all drone locations within distances of a few kilometers, depending on the type of system.  Up to now, DJI has sold AeroScope only to law-enforcement agencies and other entities that it deems appropriate for the technology. 

 

Confirming DJI's intuition, in 2020 the U. S. FAA issued regulations that make it mandatory for any drone weighing more than 0.25 kilograms (about half a pound) to broadcast its location, the operator's location, and an identifying number by 2023.  So by next year, all drones big enough to do anything other than entertain the owner will have to have such radio identification means, whether they are new or old.

 

As an ethics issue, the question of drone identification and location technology has a number of ramifications.  From the Wild-West days when consumer drones were too rare for the FAA to have made detailed regulations, we have now reached the point that drones of any size must be trackable by authorities. 

 

If drone users aren't doing anything nefarious, it's hard to imagine why they would object to the requirement that drones must broadcast their identity and location.  A useful comparison might be made to automobile license plates.  The first state to issue state-made automotive license plates was Massachusetts, back in 1910.  Most automobile owners back then were glad that the states began to register and license their vehicles, because it freed them from having to follow a hodge-podge of local regulations that often put them at a disadvantage with respect to horse-drawn vehicles legally.  Massachusetts started their early license-plate numbers with 1 and went up from there.  I don't know if this is still the case today, but up to 1999 (the last year I lived in the state), it was possible to will one's legacy two-to-four-digit license plate to one's heirs, so that your low license-plate number let everybody know that your ancestors were among the first thousand or so people to own a car in Massachusetts. 

 

I doubt that any drone owners are going to get so attached to their drone ID numbers.  But there are real privacy and security issues in the question of who can access the drone ID signals.  Because DJI has not encrypted the data up to now, the company's AeroScope is simply a convenient way for a law-enforcement agency to get into the business.  I suspect that any well-informed engineer could come up with a similar system by combining the suitable microwave receivers with decoding equipment that would not have to be fancy at all. 

 

The White House's initiative seems aimed at giving more government entities permission to do this kind of snooping, and providing them with a list of approved equipment that does so.  There is an opportunity here for entrepreneurs to get in on the ground floor of drone-detection equipment, assuming that Congress responds, but that is an open question.

 

What is not in question anymore is whether a drone operator can fly with the assurance that nobody can find out whose drone it is or where he is.  That assurance, if it was ever present, is now gone.  And in the vast majority of legitimate-use cases, this can only be an asset to the situation.

 

As for Ukrainian drones, one must applaud the ingenuity of those who repurposed commercial and amateur drones for military purposes, either for surveillance or actual delivery of weapons.  At the same time, it's not at all surprising that the Russians would use AeroScope or something similar to track down the drone operators and attack them, although at this writing it is not clear whether this has actually happened.  One does not see license plates on tanks, and so the requirements of wartime use for drones are very different. 

 

Drones originated to meet wartime needs, and it's likely that the U. S. or other allied countries can supply Ukraine with military-type drones that will be far more effective than repurposed hobby-type units. 

 

Whenever I bring up the subject of engineering ethics in a discussion, if it goes on long enough sooner or later someone will come up with the bromide, "Technology is neutral—it's only how it's used that's good or bad." 

 

Like many sayings, this one has an element of truth in it.  But anonymized drones are obviously more suited to warlike uses than ones that constantly announce both their position and the position of the operator.  So the cases of drone identification in peace and war shows that this saying is limited in its applicability, to say the least. 

 

Sources:  The Verge carried articles I referred to on various aspects of drones and AeroScope at https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/25/23041869/white-house-biden-admin-counter-drone-legislation-plan-tracking and https://www.theverge.com/22985101/dji-aeroscope-ukraine-russia-drone-tracking.   A summary of the White House initiative is at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/04/25/fact-sheet-the-domestic-counter-unmanned-aircraft-systems-national-action-plan/.  The FAA's new drone ID requirements are found at https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/28/22203398/faa-remote-id-rules-location-night-over-people.  And the story about the first automotive license plates in the U. S. is from https://time.com/4301055/license-plate-history/.