"The Regulation of Simulation in an Era of Generative AI"

Users of generative AI can create profiles on social media sites and post far more than any human can—perhaps by orders of magnitude. AI is also poised to play a dramatically more intimate and important role in parasocial and social relationships, displacing human influencers, entertainers, friends, and even romantic partners. Not only is technology becoming more capable of simulating human thought, will, and emotional response, but it is doing so at an inhuman pace. A mere human manipulator can only learn from a limited number of encounters and resources; algorithms can develop methods of manipulation at scale, based on the data of millions. This again affords computation, and those in control of its most advanced methods, an outsized role in shaping future events, preferences, and values.   

These developments must be tightly regulated, lest we drift into a posthuman future. Research on virtual reality and law has begun to explore the regulation of simulation, but must be revisited in the wake of generative AI. This talk will explore some existing legal authorities, including consumer protection statutes, trademark law, and laws proscribing unfair and deceptive acts and practices, which can limit (or at least require proper notification of) generative AI-driven simulations. For example, laws forbidding students’ use of paper-writing mills may need to be updated and specified. Legislators may also seek to restrict the communicative affordances of “virtual friends,” to clarify their true nature. The ultimate goal is a “reality-based community,” based on an overlapping consensus on human value, and values. 

Frank Pasquale is Professor of Law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. He is an expert on the law of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and machine learning. His books include The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press, 2015) and New Laws of Robotics (Harvard University Press, 2020). He edited and contributed a chapter to Care for the World: Laudato Si' and Catholic Social Thought in an Era of Climate Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He has published more than 70 journal articles and book chapters, and co-edited The Oxford Handbook on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Transparent Data Mining for Big and Small Data (Springer-Verlag, 2017).