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I'll keep this short because I've been away and it wouldn't surprise me if someone has already commented on this (though I didn't see it in my quick perusal of the site).
As we all know, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the bit of legislation that protects providers of online services from civil liability when people post otherwise actionable content on the services they host. The law says:
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1))
There's an ongoing debate about how generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT or, more immediately relevant in this case, Google's Gemini -- also known as The Colorizer) should be treated under Section 230.
The Cato Institute and I disagree on this topic. (That happens more than it used to, and I'm not sure who's doing the changing.) If it wasn't obvious before, it should be obvious now: Pretending that Google's generative AI does not in some important sense speak for Google is absurd. Gemini is Google's Mini-Me, the woke offspring of its radically progressive corporate culture. If Google is allowed to train its fashionably mendacious little brat and foist its über-woke musings on us under the protection of Section 230, as if Gemini wasn't speaking on behalf of Google, then, in the immortal words of the late Bill Paxton, "Game over, man!"
AI is a big, disruptive, potentially dangerous thing and deserves a lot of debate. But this is an easy call: No, Section 230 must not protect internet hosts and providers from liability for what their own generative AI systems create.
Discussion (44)
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I have seen examples of generated text that is libelous. Someone should be accountable for that.
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Section 230 was intended to protect Internet providers from liability for content *created by their users*. This is pretty clear from the legislative history.
The 1995 case Stratton Oakmont Inc vs Prodigy Service Co., provided part of the rationale for Section 230.
In October 1994, an unidentified user of Prodigy’s ‘Money Talk’ bulletin board asserted that Stratton Oakmont and its president committed fraudulent acts in connection with an initial public offering. Stratton sued Prodigy, as well as the unidentified user, and argued that Prodigy was acting as a publisher. Prodigy claimed it was not liable, based on the precedent of an earlier case, Cubby v CompuServe Inc.
The Stratton court held that Prodigy was liable as the publisher of the content created by its users because it exercised editorial control over the messages on their bulletin boards in three ways: 1) by posting Content Guidelines for users, 2) by enforcing those guidelines with “Board Leaders”, and 3) by utilizing screening software designed to remove offensive language. The court’s general argument for holding Prodigy liable, in the face of the CompuServe case, was that “Prodigy’s conscious choice, to gain the benefits of editorial control, has opened it up to a greater liability (than) CompuServe and other computer networks that make no such choice.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prodigy_Services_Co.
(A nonvirtual-world analogy for this case might be a job printer which normally prints whatever its customers might request, but occasionally refuses certain jobs on grounds of offensive language, etc…not sure whether there have been any such actual cases.) In any event, the Stratton case outcome was intimidating to online service providers, suggesting that any discretion whatsoever as to customers/content could get them sued for a lot of money…the cloud was removed by Section 230, passed in 1996.
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It sure does seem that, at the moment, anyone who uses generative AI is a beta tester and companies are just "workin' out the bugs", eh?
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Well, yes and no. Yes, users of generative AI are certainly beta testers. But when generative AI are programmed and/or taught by people with agendas, those agendas are reflected in the output the AI produce. The unhinged progressive/woke bias of Google's AI is not a bug, per se, but rather a feature.
The only "bug" is that, as @FullSizeTabby suggests here, Google was just a little too obvious about it.
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Apparently the guy in overall charge of the Gemini project is a big anti-white white guy. So it's definitely not an accident.
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