Welcome to 2024, DFD readers. What if generative AI could let you chat with doppelgangers of brilliant people, in their words, at any time? And what if those brilliant people were alive and had no say in the outcome? As you might have guessed, that’s no longer a “what if.” A few months ago, my colleague Phelim Kine and I learned about something both exciting and unnerving: a bot built entirely around one man’s personality, based on his writings, originally without his consent. It also turned out there wasn’t much he could do about it, despite some efforts in Congress to make it harder to copy real people. The story of psychologist Martin Seligman and his AI counterpart “Ask Martin” forces us to think hard about some questions that current tech policy is ill-suited to handle, such as what part of ourselves we “own,” how the law diverges from our own instinctive sense of justice — and also, what digital version of us may survive into the future, whether or not we want it to. The story published late last week in POLITICO Magazine and has already sparked conversations online among researchers, AI ethicists and copyright experts. Here’s an excerpt: Martin Seligman, the influential American psychologist, found himself pondering his legacy at a dinner party in San Francisco one late February evening. The guest list was shorter than it used to be: Seligman is 81, and six of his colleagues had died in the early COVID years. His thinking had already left a profound mark on the field of positive psychology, but the closer he came to his own death, the more compelled he felt to help his work survive. The next morning he received an unexpected email from an old graduate student, Yukun Zhao. His message was as simple as it was astonishing: Zhao's team had created a “virtual Seligman.” Zhao wasn’t just bragging. Over two months, by feeding every word Seligman had ever written into cutting-edge AI software, he and his team had built an eerily accurate version of Seligman himself — a talking chatbot whose answers drew deeply from Seligman’s ideas, whose prose sounded like a folksier version of Seligman’s own speech and whose wisdom anyone could access. Impressed, Seligman circulated the chatbot to his closest friends and family to check whether the AI actually dispensed advice as well as he did. “I gave it to my wife, and she was blown away by it,” Seligman said. The bot, cheerfully nicknamed “Ask Martin,” had been built by researchers based in Beijing and Wuhan — originally without Seligman’s permission or even awareness. The Chinese-built virtual Seligman is part of a broader wave of AI chatbots modeled on real humans, using the powerful new systems known as large language models to simulate their personalities online. Meta is experimenting with licensed AI celebrity avatars; you can already find internet chatbots trained on publicly available material about dead historical figures. But Seligman’s situation is also different and, in a way, more unsettling. It has cousins in a small handful of projects that have effectively replicated living people without their consent. In Southern California, tech entrepreneur Alex Furmansky created a chatbot version of Belgian celebrity psychotherapist Esther Perel by scraping her podcasts off the internet. He used the bot to counsel himself through a recent heartbreak, documenting his journey in a blog post that a friend eventually forwarded to Perel herself. Perel addressed AI Perel’s existence at the 2023 SXSW conference. Like Seligman, she was more astonished than angry about the replication of her personality. She called it “artificial intimacy.” Both Seligman and Perel eventually decided to accept the bots rather than challenge their existence. But if they’d wanted to shut down their digital replicas, it’s not clear they would have had a way to do it. Training AI on copyrighted works isn't actually illegal. If the real Martin had wanted to block access to the fake one — a replica trained on his own thinking, using his own words, to produce all-new answers — it’s not clear he could have done anything about it ... AI-generated digital replicas illuminate a new kind of policy gray zone created by powerful new “generative AI” platforms, where existing laws and old norms begin to fail. In Washington, spurred mainly by actors and performers alarmed by AI’s capacity to mimic their image and voice, some members of Congress are already attempting to curb the rise of unauthorized digital replicas. In the Senate Judiciary Committee, a bipartisan group of senators — including the leaders of the intellectual property subcommittee — are circulating a draft bill titled the NO FAKES Act that would force the makers of AI-generated digital replicas to license their use from the original human. If passed, the bill would allow individuals to authorize, and even profit from, the use of their AI-generated likeness — and bring lawsuits against cases of unauthorized use. “More and more, we’re seeing AI used to replicate someone’s likeness and voice in novel ways without consent or compensation,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) wrote to POLITICO in response to the stories of AI experimentation involving Seligman and Perel. She is one of the co-sponsors of the bill. “Our laws need to keep up with this quickly evolving technology,” she said. But even if NO FAKES Act did pass Congress, it would be largely powerless against the global tide of AI technology. Neither Perel nor Seligman reside in the country where their respective AI chatbot developers do. Perel is Belgian; her replica is based in the U.S. And AI Seligman is trained in China, where U.S. laws have little traction. “It really is one of those instances where the tools seem woefully inadequate to address the issue, even though you may have very strong intuitions about it,” said Tim Wu, a legal scholar who architected the Biden administration's antitrust and competition policies. Read the rest in POLITICO Magazine.
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