Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…Well, I want to be careful here. I’m giving the university example because, if the university system said students and professors can’t speak unfavorably about Israel in their papers, that would violate the First Amendment. If they said you can’t use AI, that almost certainly wouldn’t be, though maybe in the fullness of time, it’ll be a real question. The reason is speech is sometimes regulable if it falls into categories where there’s sufficient justification or a wholesale exclusion. If it said that deepfakes can’t be used to sell food, where the deepfakes are a collaborative effort of AI and people, it’s not clear that regulation is forbidden by the First Amendment. It might be because it’s hard to see why they’re doing that, but this is just a way of saying that the collaborative effort might be regulable because, let’s say, the collaborative effort consists of commercial fraud. Collaborative effort might be criminal conspiracy. Those are just wholesale exclusions, but they’re hard-won exclusions. That is, they’re argued for and the argument won. If there’s a collaborative effort that isn’t within the domain of the currently regulable, we can probably imagine somewhere it would be hard to know whether it’s protected by the First Amendment. Basically, a collaborative effort by, let’s say, a presidential candidate and an AI to produce a speech — completely protected by the First Amendment. A collaborative effort by you and AI, let’s say, to produce a book on the greatest psychologist of all time — that’s going to be protected by the First Amendment. Can’t you imagine an AI company that generates AI answers, but a second before they’re released to the human interlocutor, they just have some other human who works for them modify the answer a bit. Not materially, and maybe we don’t know how much, but they can truthfully say this is co-authored output. Then they say it’s all protected by the First Amendment because it’s AI and humans, and de facto, you end up with complete AI First Amendment protection. I think the way in is to get concrete on what the speech is and what the reason for regulating it is. If I am working with AI — let’s suppose I’m working for a political candidate, and it’s mostly AI, but a little bit me, and it ends up being the words of a presidential candidate — that can’t be regulated. The idea that you can regulate a politician’s speech because AI played a significant role, or maybe the entire role — that’s very hard to defend. Now, we would have a frontiers issue, I guess, if there’s a law — it seems crazy, but a law — saying that no politician may give a speech which is entirely produced by AI. That would be a new question. It would probably come out unfavorably to the law. If, on the other hand, deepfakes are restricted on the ground that, and when, they give a misleading picture of some person in a way that is either libelous or libel adjacent, then it might well be regulable.…

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