How the Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks about AI

You know the ways AI is regularly talked about—how much can it really do? How much will it cost? Environment? Bubble? We get that. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation wants to have a different conversation about AI. EFF's background on AI is deep. In 2017, we launched a detailed project to Measure the Progress of AI Research , encouraging machine learning researchers to give us feedback and contribute to the effort . That project was archived for lack of bandwidth, staffing, and the complexity and time required. But just five years later and the "progress of AI" is a global concern/topic, and everyone, including EFF, is thinking about it. Here's how *we* think about it, from the perspective of protecting civil liberties AND innovation. What do you think, and what are we missing? This is our summary: AI technologies are affecting our civil liberties as never before. Ensuring that AI serves people, not power, starts with cutting through the hype. AI technologies are not magic wands—they are general-purpose tools. If we want to regulate those technologies to reduce harms without shutting down benefits, we have to focus on who uses AI, what products they use, and how they use them. Where we see potential benefits, like improving weather forecasting, facilitating medical research, identifying systemic bias, or fostering accessibility, we work to ensure those benefits can be realized. Where we see potential harms, we consider the practical and legal tools we already have, like pressure campaigns, privacy lawsuits, and transparency measures. If we need new tools, we should create protections tailored to the actual problem – not just to the latest outrage. For example, if policymakers are worried about AI accelerating systemic privacy violations, they should enact real and comprehensive privacy legislation that covers all corporate surveillance and data use, and close the data broker loophole to limit government surveillance. And to keep the window open for a better futu