Welcome to 2024, DFD readers.

What if generative AI could let you chat with doppelgangers of brilliant people, in their words, at any time? And what if those brilliant people were alive and had no say in the outcome?

As you might have guessed, that’s no longer a “what if.” A few months ago, my colleague Phelim Kine and I learned about something both exciting and unnerving: a bot built entirely around one man’s personality, based on his writings, originally without his consent.

It also turned out there wasn’t much he could do about it, despite some efforts in Congress to make it harder to copy real people.

The story of psychologist Martin Seligman and his AI counterpart “Ask Martin” forces us to think hard about some questions that current tech policy is ill-suited to handle, such as what part of ourselves we “own,” how the law diverges from our own instinctive sense of justice — and also, what digital version of us may survive into the future, whether or not we want it to.

The story published late last week in POLITICO Magazine and has already sparked conversations online among researchers, AI ethicists and copyright experts.

Here’s an excerpt:

Martin Seligman, the influential American psychologist, found himself pondering his legacy at a dinner party in San Francisco one late February evening. The guest list was shorter than it used to be: Seligman is 81, and six of his colleagues had died in the early COVID years. His thinking had already left a profound mark on the field of positive psychology, but the closer he came to his own death, the more compelled he felt to help his work survive.

The next morning he received an unexpected email from an old graduate student, Yukun Zhao. His message was as simple as it was astonishing: Zhao’s team had created a “virtual Seligman.”

Zhao wasn’t just bragging. Over two months, by feeding every word Seligman had ever written into cutting-edge AI software, he and his team had built an eerily accurate version of Seligman himself — a talking chatbot whose answers drew deeply from Seligman’s ideas, whose prose sounded like a folksier version of Seligman’s own speech and whose wisdom anyone could access.

Impressed, Seligman circulated the chatbot to his closest friends and family to check whether the AI actually dispensed advice as well as he did. “I gave it to my wife, and she was blown away by it,” Seligman said.

The bot, cheerfully nicknamed “Ask Martin,” had been built by researchers based in Beijing and Wuhan — originally without Seligman’s permission or even awareness.

The Chinese-built virtual Seligman is part of a broader wave of AI chatbots modeled on real humans, using the powerful new systems known as large language models to simulate their personalities online. Meta is experimenting with licensed AI celebrity avatars; you can already find internet chatbots trained on publicly available material about dead historical figures.

But Seligman’s situation is also different and, in a way, more unsettling. It has cousins in a small handful of projects that have effectively replicated living people without their consent. In Southern California, tech entrepreneur Alex Furmansky created a chatbot version of Belgian celebrity psychotherapist Esther Perel by scraping her podcasts off the internet. He used the bot to counsel himself through a recent heartbreak, documenting his journey in a blog post that a friend eventually forwarded to Perel herself.

Perel addressed AI Perel’s existence at the 2023 SXSW conference. Like Seligman, she was more astonished than angry about the replication of her personality. She called it “artificial intimacy.”

Both Seligman and Perel eventually decided to accept the bots rather than challenge their existence. But if they’d wanted to shut down their digital replicas, it’s not clear they would have had a way to do it. Training AI on copyrighted works isn’t actually illegal. If the real Martin had wanted to block access to the fake one — a replica trained on his own thinking, using his own words, to produce all-new answers — it’s not clear he could have done anything about it …

AI-generated digital replicas illuminate a new kind of policy gray zone created by powerful new “generative AI” platforms, where existing laws and old norms begin to fail.

In Washington, spurred mainly by actors and performers alarmed by AI’s capacity to mimic their image and voice, some members of Congress are already attempting to curb the rise of unauthorized digital replicas. In the Senate Judiciary Committee, a bipartisan group of senators — including the leaders of the intellectual property subcommittee — are circulating a draft bill titled the NO FAKES Act that would force the makers of AI-generated digital replicas to license their use from the original human.

If passed, the bill would allow individuals to authorize, and even profit from, the use of their AI-generated likeness — and bring lawsuits against cases of unauthorized use.

“More and more, we’re seeing AI used to replicate someone’s likeness and voice in novel ways without consent or compensation,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) wrote to POLITICO in response to the stories of AI experimentation involving Seligman and Perel. She is one of the co-sponsors of the bill. “Our laws need to keep up with this quickly evolving technology,” she said.

But even if NO FAKES Act did pass Congress, it would be largely powerless against the global tide of AI technology.

Neither Perel nor Seligman reside in the country where their respective AI chatbot developers do. Perel is Belgian; her replica is based in the U.S. And AI Seligman is trained in China, where U.S. laws have little traction.

“It really is one of those instances where the tools seem woefully inadequate to address the issue, even though you may have very strong intuitions about it,” said Tim Wu, a legal scholar who architected the Biden administration’s antitrust and competition policies.

Read the rest in POLITICO Magazine.

One of the more remarkable stories in global technology is how a single semiconductor company has become its own geopolitical force — Taiwan’s TSMC, which both the U.S. and China are warily watching for its dominance in manufacturing the world’s most advanced chips.

Now it looks like the company could have a different kind of influence. As it plans an Arizona expansion and reportedly seeks up to $15 billion in subsidies from the CHIPS and Science Act, TSMC’s growing U.S. footprint is becoming a partisan attack point in domestic Taiwanese politics.

During a live televised debate Monday ahead of the island’s Jan. 13 presidential election, Jaw Shaw-Kong, the vice presidential nominee of the Kuomintang opposition party, blamed the ruling Democratic Progressive Party for stoking tensions with China that could scare off foreign capital.

“If Taiwan does not have a peaceful environment, nobody will dare invest,” Jaw said, according to Reuters. “Our TSMC wants to run off overseas … hollowing out our Taiwan.”

His opponent, Hsiao Bi-khim, Taiwan’s former envoy to the U.S., defended TSMC as “the pride of Taiwan,” saying it “should not be used for political competition or consumption.”

It’s not clear how much traction the attack will have. But any little tilt matters: The Kuomintang party wants to pull Taiwan closer to China, while according to POLITICO’s Eric Bazail-Eimil, a win from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party would mean Taiwan would continue to be mindful of U.S. concerns. The U.S. is closely monitoring the election, especially given the tone it will set for Washington-Beijing relations and Biden’s promise to defend Taiwan should China invade.

— Christine Mui

The Supreme Court might be one the most hidebound institutions in the U.S., but the chief justice wants you to know that it isn’t scared of technology — even AI.

As POLITICO’s Josh Gerstein reports, Chief Justice John Roberts dedicates a notable chunk of his year-end annual note on the state of the federal courts to a rumination on the future role of artificial intelligence in the federal courts. “Legal research may soon be unimaginable without it,” Roberts writes. “AI obviously has great potential to dramatically increase access to key information for lawyers and non-lawyers alike. But just as obviously it risks invading privacy interests and dehumanizing the law.”

Along the way, Roberts delivers a short and almost quirky history of the Court’s adoption of technology, starting with the Wang computer rented by Justice Lewis Powell way back in 1976.

“Several other Justices observed the satisfactory performance of this newfangled ‘word processing machine’ and followed suit the next year,” Roberts recounts (though, surprisingly, the hot lead printing press for official documents wasn’t retired until the 1980s).

When it comes to AI, Roberts sees a clear opening for new software that improves citizens’ access to federal courts, especially helping with details of process and court forms. Still, he urges caution when it comes to the substantive work of the law, flagging both AI hallucinations and basic public trust as continuing problems. In a bit of literary flourish, he makes a final case for the enduring importance of the human as umpire:

“Nuance matters,” he writes. “Much can turn on a shaking hand, a quivering voice, a change of inflection, a bead of sweat, a moment’s hesitation, a fleeting break in eye contact. And most people still trust humans more than machines to perceive and draw the right inferences from these clues.”

— Stephen Heuser

Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger ([email protected]); Derek Robertson ([email protected]); Mohar Chatterjee ([email protected]); Steve Heuser ([email protected]); Nate Robson ([email protected]), Daniella Cheslow ([email protected]), and Christine Mui ([email protected]).

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