Questions about how best to regulate the exponentially growing technology that is artificial intelligence have been circulating publicly ever since Sam Altman -- the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT -- testified before a Senate hearing on AI oversight in May. Altman said at the time that "regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models."
Since then, though the EU has come the closest with its AI Act, no meaningful regulation has been cemented. But OpenAI and Microsoft (the company's chief investor) are now facing a massive class-action lawsuit that is essentially asking the court to regulate them.
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The complaint, which was filed June 28 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges, among other things, that OpenAI, upon restructuring into a for-profit business in 2019, engaged in a strategy to "secretly harvest massive amounts of personal data from the internet ... essentially every piece of data exchanged on the internet it could take."
The company, the suit alleges, does this without providing notice to the "hundreds of millions of internet users" impacted, and certainly without their consent. OpenAI, according to the suit, engaged in the "scraping of our digital footprints" at every opportunity, then "unjustly earned profits based on unauthorized harvesting of personal data."
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But the suit goes beyond allegations of rampant privacy violations. It goes on to bring up the extinction-level risk that has been touted by Altman himself, accusing the company of dangerous disregard.
'Potentially catastrophic risk to humanity.'
"Defendants’ disregard for privacy laws is matched only by their disregard for the potentially catastrophic risk to humanity," the lawsuit alleges. "Emblematic of both the ultimate risk -- and Defendants’ open disregard -- is this statement from Defendant OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”
The lawsuit goes on to accuse OpenAI of creating an "AI arms race in which Defendants and other Big Tech companies are onboarding society into a plane that over half of the surveyed AI experts believe has at least a 10% chance of crashing and killing everyone on board."
In addition to seeking damages, the complaint is asking for a "temporary freeze on commercial access to and development" of ChatGPT until OpenAI is in compliance with at least a few of the 11 different regulatory options listed, which include full transparency and accountability protocols, an 'AI Council' to approve products before deployment, technological safety measures and the option for users to opt-out of data collection.
Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft responded to requests for comment. You can read the entirety of the lawsuit here.
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