There’s an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution happening, one that regulators don’t seem ready to address.That’s according to a recent report by Bloomberg News, which argues that officials haven’t yet grappled with the potential of AI to allow for mass surveillance and put people in danger.“We need to regulate this, we need laws,” Janet Haven, executive director of Data & Society, a New York-based nonprofit research group, told Bloomberg.“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.”The report notes that the most advanced AI regulation proposal comes from the European Union, which introduced a still-being-debated law governing “high risk” AI usage in 2021. Now, Bloomberg said, supporters of the law want to declare ChatGPT as high risk.Until governments take action, the report argued, the chief thing stopping AI could be the restrictions its architects put on themselves.“For me, the thing that will raise alarm bells is if organizations are driving towards commercializing without equally talking about how they are ensuring it’s being done in a responsible way,” said Steven Mills, chief AI ethics officer at Boston Consulting Group “We’re still not sure yet what these technologies can do.”This report comes on the heels of a call by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for regulations into the AI, something that organization says “virtually every business” will eventually use.“That’s because as future-fit tools like generative AI-based engines continue to gain momentum, enterprises across industries are activating the benefits of new modalities and moments of next-generation data sets,” PYMNTS wrote recently, “with responsive, deep-learning tools that can effectively leverage contextually primed neural networks to a degree previously only thought possible within the executive seat of our own frontal lobes.”These fledgling algorithms, still just being deployed in the marketplace, have the potential to dramatically alter the worlds of commerce, payments and broader business processes.This week also saw the debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, which, as PYMNTS noted, can grasp more than one modality of information, where its predecessor was limited to text.“GPT-4 can read, analyze, or generate up to 25,000 words of text, a significant improvement over the earlier GPT-3.5 model and those prior,” PYMNTS wrote. “It also can now respond to images and answer questions around visual stimuli. For example, if shown a photograph of a fridge or cabinet, ChatGPT-4 can suggest recipes using the ingredients on hand — although this solution was only demoed and has not yet been made available for public use.”As noted here earlier, this new and disruptive ability of AI tools to move through a myriad of data — image, speech, text, etc. — is what makes modern artificial intelligence solutions worthy of being called “intelligent.”

Data & Society is pleased to announce that Brian J. Chen has joined the organization as policy director.

Rai joins Data & Society from the Vera Institute of Justice, where she was the media strategy director.