In the face of increasing competition, it seems unlikely that AI companies will ever take their foot off the gas. One avenue to slow AI development down is to make investment in AI less attractive. This could be done by increasing the legal risk associated with incorporating AI in products.
My understanding of the law is limited, but the EU seems particularly friendly to this approach. The European Commission recently proposed the AI Liability Directive, which aims to make it easier to sue over AI products. In the US, companies are at the very least directly responsible for what their chatbots say, and it seems like it's only a matter of time until a chatbot genuinely harms a user, either by gaslighting or by abusive behavior.
A charity could provide legal assistance to victims of AI in seminal cases, similar to how EFF provides legal assistance for cases related to Internet freedom.
Besides helping the affected person, this would hopefully:
- Signal to organizations that giving users access to AI is risky business
- Scare away new players in the market
- Scare away investors
- Give the AI company in question a bad rep, and sway the public opinion against AI companies in general
- Limit the ventures large organizations would be willing to jump into
- Spark policy discussions (e.g. about limiting minor access to chatbots, which would also limit profits)
All of these things would make AI a worse investment, AI companies a less attractive place to work, etc. I'm not sure it'll make a big difference, but I don't think it's less likely to move the needle than academic work on AI safety.
The linked article says -- persuasively, in my view -- that Section 230 generally doesn't shield companies like OpenAI for what their chatbots say. But that merely takes away a shield; you still need a sword (a theory of liability) on top of that.
My guess is that most US courts will rely significantly on analogies in absence of legislative action. Some of those are not super-friendly to litigation. Arguably the broadest analogy is to buggy software with security holes that can be exploited and cause damage; I don't think plaintiffs have had much success with those sorts of lawsuits. If there is an interveining human actor, that also can make causation more difficult to establish. Obviously that is all at the 100,000 foot level and off the cuff! To the extent the harmed person is a user of the AI, they may have signed an agreement that limits their ability to sue (both by waiving certain claims, by limiting potential damages, or by onerous procedural requirements that mandate private arbitration and preclude class actions).
There are some activities at common law that are seen as superhazardous and which impose strict liability on the entity conducting them -- using explosives is the usual example. But -- I don't understand there to be a plausible case that using AI in an application right now is similarly superhazardous in a way that would justify extending those precedents to AI harm.