Regulating AI: 3 experts explain why it's difficult to do and important to get right

From fake photos of Donald Trump being arrested by New York City police officers to a chatbot describing a very-much-alive computer scientist as having died tragically, the ability of the new generation of generative artificial intelligence systems to create convincing but fictional text and images is setting off alarms about fraud and misinformation on steroids. Indeed, a group of artificial intelligence researchers and industry figures urged the industry on March 29, 2023, to pause further training of the latest AI technologies or, barring that, for governments to "impose a moratorium." These technologies – image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, and text generators like Bard, ChatGPT, Chinchilla and LLaMA – are now available to millions of people and don't require technical knowledge to use. Given the potential for widespread harm as technology companies roll out these AI systems and test them on the public, policymakers are faced with the task of determining whether and how to regulate the emerging technology. The Conversation asked three experts on technology policy to explain why regulating AI is such a challenge – and why it's so important to get it right.