I asked a few AI experts to help sketch out guidelines for the new reality that anything you post might be AI data fuel. Technology has outraced our ethics and laws. And it’s not fair to put you in the position of imagining whether your Pinterest board might someday be used to teach murderous AI robots or put your sister out of a job.

“While it’s absolutely a good individual practice to limit digital sharing in any case where you don’t or can’t know the afterlife of your data, doing that is not going to have a major impact on corporate and government misuse of data,” said Emily Tucker, executive director at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law.

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Tucker said that people need to organise to demand privacy regulations and other restrictions that would stop our data from being hoarded and used in ways we can’t imagine.

“We have almost no statutory privacy protections in this country, and powerful institutions have been exploiting that for so long that we have begun to act as if it’s normal,” Tucker said. “It’s not normal, and it’s not right.”

Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, artists in Berlin, helped set up a project to identify artists’ work or your photos from popular databases used to train AI systems. Dryhurst told me that some AI organisations including LAION, the massive image collection used to generate Lensa portraits, are eager for people to flag their personal images if they want to yank them from computer training data sets. (The website is Have I Been Trained.)

Dryhurst said that he is excited about the potential of AI for artists like him. But he also has been pushing for a different model of permission for what you put online. Imagine, he said, if you upload your selfie to Instagram and have the option to say yes or no to the photo being used for future AI training.

Maybe that sounds like a utopian fantasy. You have gotten used to the feeling that once you put digital bits of yourself or your loved ones online, you lose control of what happens next. Dryhurst told me that with publicly available AI, such as Dall-E and ChatGPT, getting a lot of attention but still imperfect, this is an ideal time to reestablish what real personal consent should be for the AI age. And he said that some influential AI organisations are open to this, too.

Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told me that individuals, government officials, many technology executives, journalists and educators like him are far more attuned than they were a few years ago to the potential positive and negative consequences of emerging technologies like AI.

The hard part, he said, is knowing what to do to effectively limit the harms and maximise the benefits.

“We’ve exposed the problems,” Farid said. “We don’t know how to fix them.”

The Washington Post

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