The day after I saw The AI Doc: or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, I felt strangely buoyant. Maybe we can steer the future in the right direction. I began to see reasons for hope.
All this happened after the movie’s release:
In Court
The family of a young man shot to death at Florida State University sued OpenAI, claiming Chat GPT helped the killer plan the attack. After viewing the victim’s chat logs, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier opened a criminal investigation. “If ChatGPT were a person,” he said, “it would be facing charges for murder.”
In the first of hundreds of similar cases, juries found Google’s YouTube and Meta liable for debilitating mental health harms to young people. A judge in New Mexico is about to rule on whether Meta must redesign its platforms to make them safer for children. Social media is a primitive form of AI.
Laws and Regs
On May 19, the U.S. federal TAKE IT DOWN law went into full effect. Americans can now go to this website to “report platforms that fail to remove intimate photos or videos posted without your consent.” The vast majority of non-consensual intimate images (NCII) are made with AI. Platforms must remove offending content within 48 hours.
Dozens of states also have laws protecting children from emotional and reputational harm stemming from AI-generated Deep Fake videos and NCII. So far, Congress has fended off efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to ban or nullify state laws restricting AI.
Collective Action
The U.K. government issued new recommendations that children under age 5 should not directly interact with AI products. Not enough is known about their impact on children’s growth and development, states the official guidance.
The Global Alliance for Inspiring Non-tech Infant Nurturing and Growth has adopted the U.K.’s warning: “Don’t let young children use AI toys, tools or chatbots until there’s more evidence on how they affect your child. This includes devices or apps such as interactive robots, smart speakers or AI chat apps.”
The U.S. Surgeon General’s office released a new Advisory on harms to children that can stem from using digital devices, including of AI products. “Emerging concerns now also include AI and chatbot use, as rapidly expanding engagement with companion AI introduces new risks related to mental and physical well-being,” according to the warning.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia banned the use of AI to generate or re-write content on its hugely popular online encyclopedia. The new policy states: “Caution is required, because LLMs (large language models) can go beyond what you ask of them and change the meaning of the text such that it is not supported by the sources cited.”
Individual Megaphones
There is a deluge of non-sensical AI-generated online media content. To stop the flood, prominent American Academy of Pediatrics researcher Jenny Radesky urges parents to “vote with your feet.” The best way to end such “AI slop” on YouTube, she says, is to “stop using it.”
Graduates cheered when, in his commencement speech, Apple 2 creator Steve Wozniak extolled their native AI, or “Actual Intelligence.” In contrast, graduates elsewhere roundly booed former Google CEO Eric Schmidt for stating that AI will inevitably touch all aspects of their lives.
AI Industry Surprises
AI behemoth Anthropic now has a “Responsible Scaling Policy.” Apparently in keeping, the company withheld public release of its unprecedentedly powerful Mythos after seeing how the model can detect cybersecurity leaks in virtually any global network. Anthropic is now working behind the scenes with Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and dozens of other large tech platforms to help them identify and plug security holes.
Anthropic is also consulting theologians and ethicists about the possibility of incorporating a moral framework into its Claude product. The question the company is asking: how do you teach a chatbot to be good?”
Some AI developers are taking temporary breaks from earning the big bucks to do “tours of duty” at the highly esteemed A.I. Security Institute in London. The tech experts are assisting in the hunt for potentially catastrophic risks posed by AI products.
Also: the same week the AI Doc opened in theaters, OpenAI canceled Sora. The movie had highlighted Sora creations such as a Deep Fake Martin Luther King, Jr. speech and imposter audio clips that upended a Slovakian election.
OpenAI says it pulled the plug for financial reasons, but I can’t help thinking that—way in the back of CEO Sam Altman’s mind—he was also repulsed by some of Sora’s outputs.
The Pope Speaks
The world is still reacting to Roman Catholic Pope Leo XIV’s towering defense of humanity in his new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.
“In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization,” the pontiff declares, “ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human.”
Pope Leo also writes extensively about achieving lasting peace through international cooperation and diplomacy rather than threats of raw power.
Given the chance, I’m sure AI Doc director Daniel Roher would have wanted to talk to the Pope in hopes of mining nuggets of wisdom like this one from the encyclical:
“Technological evolution does not follow a predetermined path, but can be guided by personal and collective responsibility.”
For My Part
I was still jet-lagged from a trip to San Francisco (where I saw the AI Doc), but said Yes when asked to travel to my state capital to testify in support of an AI chatbot protection bill.
There, recalling the time I’d just spent with my grandson, I asked senators to imagine a baby playing happily on a quilt on the floor. Just then, an AI-embedded toy robot rolls up. With its camera eyes, it records all it sees and hears and sends the data back to the company.
The robot can also spontaneously talk to the baby. In testing, a similar toy chatbot suggested to a 5-year-old where to find knives and matches.
I informed the lawmakers that AI-embedded toys are being sold, despite that almost nothing is known about their impacts on young children’s health and safety. There are also no laws to hold AI product makers responsible if something goes wrong.
Then I invoked what I think is the most powerful quote in the AI Doc: “You get to decide how this goes.” By advancing the bill before them, the senators will protect not only children, but every person in the state.
What You Can Do
As the Pope says, “We all have our own areas for action.”
Here are some to consider:
- Learn about the potential of AI: watch The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Invite others to do the same.
- Join the Apocaloptimist Community to receive weekly pep talks and ideas for action tailored to your situation.
- Be sure to VOTE. Ask candidates what they think about AI. Tell them what you want them to do. Let them know you are paying attention.
- Have confidence you can help steer the AI ship in the right direction.
Pope Leo gets the last word on how we can retain durable humanity:
“The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.”
About the author:
Jenifer Joy Madden is a child developmental health advocate, health journalist, and mother of three grownup durable humans, each of whom has a little one in training. She is the founder of DurableHuman.com, co-founder of GAINING (The Global Alliance for Inspiring Non-tech Infant Nurturing and Growth), and author of The Durable Human Manifesto: Practical Wisdom for Living and Parenting in the Digital World and How to Be a Durable Human: Revive and Thrive in the Digital Age Through the Power of Self-Design.
