YouTube case in the US Supreme Court may affect artificial intelligence tools – 04/24/2023 – Market

When the US Supreme Court decides in the coming months whether to weaken a powerful shield that protects internet companies, the decision could also have implications for rapidly developing technologies such as the ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot.

Judges must decide by the end of June whether YouTube can be sued for its video recommendations to users. The case tests whether a US law that protects technology platforms from legal liability for content posted online by their users also applies when companies use algorithms to target recommendations to users.

The discussion comes about because the algorithms that power generative AI tools like ChatGPT and its successor GPT-4 operate somewhat similar to those that suggest videos to YouTube users, the experts added.

Representatives from OpenAI, creator of ChaGPT, and Google declined to comment.

During a hearing in February, Supreme Court justices expressed uncertainty about whether to weaken the protections enshrined in the law, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. While the case is not directly related to generative AI, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that tools that generate “poetry” and “polemics” are unlikely to enjoy such legal protections.

“CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR OWN ACTIONS”

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, who helped draft the bill while in the House of Representatives, said the liability shield should not apply to generative artificial intelligence tools because those tools “create content.”

“Section 230 deals with the protection of users and websites to host and organize user speech. The law should not protect companies from the consequences of their own actions and products,” Wyden said in a statement to Reuters.

The tech industry has pushed to preserve Section 230 despite bipartisan opposition to immunity. The industry said tools like ChatGPT work like search engines, directing users to existing content in response to a query.

“Artificial intelligence isn’t really creating anything. It’s taking existing content and putting it in a different way or format,” said Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel of NetChoice, a technology industry lobby group.

Szabo said a weakened Section 230 will present an impossible task for AI developers, threatening to expose them to a flood of litigation that could stifle innovation.

Some experts predict that courts can strike a middle ground, examining the context in which the AI ​​model generated a potentially damaging response.

Hany Farid, a technologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said it’s very difficult to argue that AI developers should be immune from lawsuits over models they “programmed, trained and deployed”.

“When companies are held liable in civil litigation for damage caused by the products they produce, they produce safer products,” Farid said. “And when they are not held accountable, they produce less safe products.”

The case being decided by the Supreme Court involves an appeal against YouTube brought by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old college student from California who was shot dead in a 2015 riot by Islamist militants in Paris.

The lawsuit accuses the company of providing “material support” to terrorism and said YouTube, through the video-sharing platform’s algorithms, illegally recommended videos from the Islamic State militant group, which claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, to certain people. users.