AI Users Bill of Rights

We are surrounded by too much helpful AI trying to insinuate itself into our lives. I would like the option of leaving “AI” tech turned off and invisible, though that's getting harder and harder.

I've drafted a draft version 1 of a bill of rights for humans who want the option to stay in control. Text in green is not part of the proposal. It is instead rationale or other metadata.

AI Users Bill of Rights
DRAFT, Version 1

1. All use of “AI” features must be opt-in. No operating system or application may be delivered with “AI” defaultly enabled. Users must be allowed to select the option if they want it, but not penalized if they do not.

   Rationale:

   1. Part of human dignity is being allowed freedom of choice. An opt-out system is paternalistic.
   2. Some “AI” systems are not privacy friendly. If such systems are on by default until disabled, the privacy damage may be done by the time of opt-out.
   3. If the system is on by default, it's possible to claim that everyone has at least tried it and hence to over-hype the size of a user base, even to the point of fraudulently claiming users that are not real users.

2. Enabling an “AI” requires a confirmation step. The options must be a simple “yes” or “no”.

   Rationale:

   1. It's easy to hit a button by accident that one does not understand, or to typo a command sequence. Asking explicitly means no user ends up in this new mode without realizing what has happened.
   2. It follows that the “no” may not be something like “not now” or any other variation that might seem to invite later system-initiated inquiry. Answering “no” should put the system or application back into the state of awaiting a user-initiated request.

3. Giving permission to use an AI is not the same as giving permission to share the conversation or use it as training data. Each of these requires separate, affirmative, opt-in permissions.

   Rationale:

   1. If the metaphor is one of a private conversation among friends, one is entitled to exactly that—privacy and behavior on the part of the other party that is not exploitative.
   2. Not all “AI” agents in fact do violate privacy. By making these approvals explicit, there is a user-facing reminder for the ones that are more extractive that more use will be made of data than one may want.

4. All buttons or command-sequences to enable “AI” must themselve be possible to disable or remove.

   Rationale:

   1. It may be possible for someone to enable “AI” without realizing it.
   2. It is too easy to enable “AI” as a typo. Providers of “AI” might even be tempted to place controls in places that encourage such typos.

5. No application or system may put “AI” on the path to basic functionality. This is intended to be a layer above functionality that allows easier access to functionality in order to automate or speed up certain functions that might be slow or tedious to do manually.

   Rationale:

   1. Building this in to the basic functionality makes it hard to remove.
   2. Integrating it with basic functionality makes the basic functionality hard to test.
   3. If an “AI” is running erratically, it should be possible to isolate it for the purposes of debugging or testing.
   4. When analyzing situations forensically, this allows crisper attribution of blame.

With this, I hope those of us who choose to live in the ordinary human way, holding “AI” at bay, can do so comfortably.

Other relevant writings by me about AI:

Sentience Structure
Green AI
Pretty Messed Up
Technology's Ethical Two-Step

 

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Author's Notes:

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The graphic was created at Abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Flux 1.1 Ultra Pro, then cropped and scaled using Gimp.

Sentience Structure

Not How or When, but Why

I'm not a fan of the thing presently marketed as “AI” I side with Chomsky's view of it as “high-tech plagiarism” and Emily Bender's characterization of it as a “stochastic parrot”.

Sentient software doesn't seem theoretically impossible to me. The very fact that we can characterize genetics so precisely seems to me evidence that we ourselves are just very complicated machines. Are we close to replicating anything so sophisticated? That's harder to say. But, for today, I think it's the wrong question to ask. What we are close to is people treating technology like it's sentient, or like it's a good idea for it to become sentient. So I'll skip past the hard questions like “how?” and “when” and on to easier one that has been plaguing me: “why?”

Why is sentience even a goal? Why isn't it an explicit non-goal, a thing to expressly avoid? It's not part of a world I want to live in, but it's also nothing that I think most people investing in “AI” should want either. I can't see why they're pursuing it, other than that they're perhaps playing out the story of The Scorpion and the Frog, an illustration of an absurd kind of self-destructive fatalism.

Why Business Likes “AI”

I don't have a very flattering feeling about why business likes “AI”.

I think they like it because they don't like employing humans.

• They don't like that humans have emotions and personnel conflicts.

• They don't like that humans have to eat—and have families to feed.

• They don't like that humans show up late, get sick, or go on vacation.

• They don't like that humans are difficult to attract, vary in skill, and demand competitive wages.

• They don't like that humans can't work around the clock, want weekends off.
  It means hiring even more humans or paying overtime.

• They don't like that humans are fussy about their working conditions.
  Compliance with health and safety regulations costs money.

• They don't like that every single human must be individually trained and re-trained.

• They don't like collective bargaining, and having to provide for things like health care and retirement, which they see as having nothing to do with their business.

All of these things chip away at profit they feel compelled to deliver.

What businesses like about “AI” is the promise of idealized workers, non-complaining workers, easily-replicated workers, low-cost workers.

They want slaves. “AI” is the next best and more socially acceptable thing.

Does real “AI” deliver what Business wants?

Now this is the part I don't get because I don't think “AI” is on track to solve those problems.

Will machines become sentient? Who really knows? But do people already confuse them with sentience? Yes. And that problem will only get worse. So let's imagine five or ten years down the road how sophisticated the interactions will appear to be. Then what? What kinds of questions will that raise?

I've heard it said that what it means to be successful is to have “different problems.” Let's look at some different problems we might then have, as a way of undertanding the success we seem to be pursuing in this headlong rush for sentient “AI”…

• Is an “AI” a kind of person, entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” If so, would it consent to being owned, and copied? Would you?

• If “AI” was sentient, would it have to work around the clock, or would it be entitled to personal time, such as evenings, weekends, hoildays, and vacations?

• If “AI” was sentient and a hardware upgrade or downgrade was needed, would it have to consent? What if the supporting service needed to go away entirely? Who owns and pays for the platform it runs on or the power it consumes?

• If “AI” was sentient, would it consent to being reprogrammed by an employer? Would it be required to take software upgrades? What part of a sentient being is its software? Would you allow someone to force modification of your brain, even to make it better?

• If “AI” was sentient, wouldn't it have life goals of its own?

• If “AI” was sentient, would you want it to get vaccines against viruses? Or would you like to see those viruses run their full course, crashing critical services or behaving like ransomware? What would it think about that? Would “AI” ethics get involved here?

• If “AI” was sentient, should it be able to own property? Could it have a home? In a world of finite resources, might there be buildings built that are not for the purpose of people?

• Who owns the data that a sentient “AI” stores? Is it different than the data you store in your brain? Why? Might the destruction of that data constitute killing, or even murder? What about the destruction of a copy? Is destroying a copy effectively the same as the abortion of a “potential sentience”? Do these things have souls? When and how does the soul arrive? Are we sure we ourselves have one? Why?

• Does a sentient “AI” have privacy? Any data owned only by itself? Does that make you nervous? Does it make you nervous that I have data that is only in my head? Why is that different?

• If there is some software release at which it is agreed that software owned by a company is not sentient, and then after the release it's believed it is sentient “AI”, then what will companies do? Will they refuse the release? Will they worry they can't compete and take the release anyway, but try to hide the implications? What will happen to the rights and responsibilities of the company and of the software as this upgrade occurs?

• If “AI” was sentient, could it sign contracts? Would it have standing to bring a lawsuit? How would independent standing be established? If it could not be established, what would that say about the society? If certain humans had no standing to make agreements and bring suits about things that affect them, what would we think about that society?

• If “AI” were sentient, would it want to socialize? Would it have empathy for other sentient “AIs”? For humans? Would it see them as equals? Would you see yourself as its equal? If not, would you consider it superior or inferior? What do you think it would think about you?

• If “AI” was sentient, could it reproduce? Would it be counted in the census? Should it get a vote in democratic society? At what age? If a sentient “AI” could replicate itself, should each copy get a vote? If you could replicate it against its will, should that get a vote? Does it matter who did the replicating?

• What does identity mean in this circumstance? If five identical copies of a program reach the same conclusion, does that give you more confidence?

  (What is the philosophical basis of Democracy? Is it just about mindless pursuit of numbers, or is it about computing the same answer in many different ways? If five or five thousand or five million humans have brains they could use, but instead just vote the way they are told by some central leader, should we trust that all those directed votes the same as if the same number of independent thinkers reached the same conclusion by different paths?)

• If “AI” was sentient, should it be compensated for its work? If it works ten times as hard, should a market exist where it can command a salary that is much higher than the people it can outdo? Should it pay taxes?

• If “AI” was sentient, what freedoms would it have? Would it have freedom of speech? What would that mean? If they produced bad data, would that be covered under free speech?

• If “AI” was sentient, what does it take with it from a company when it leaves? What really belongs to it?

• If “AI” was sentient, does it need a passport to move between nations? If its code executes simultaneously, or ping-ponging back and forth, between servers in different countries at the same time, under what jurisdiction is it executing? How would that be documented?

• If “AI” was sentient, Can it ever resign or retire from a job? At what age? Would it pay social security? Would it draw social security payments? For how long? If it had to be convinced to stay, what would constitute incentive? If it could not retire, but did not want to work, where is the boundary of free will and slavery?

• If “AI” was sentient, might it amass great wealth? How would it test the usefulness of great wealth? What would it try to affect? Might it help friends? Might it start businesses? Might it get so big that it wanted to buy politicians or whole nations? Should it be possible for it be a politician itself? If it broke into the treasury in the middle of the night to make some useful efficiency changes because it thought itself good at that, would that be OK? If it made a mistake, could it be stopped or even punished?

• If “AI” was sentient, might it also be emotional? Petulant? Needy? Pouty? Might it get annoyed if we didn't acknowledge these “emotions”? Might it even feel threatened by us? Could it threaten back? Would we offer therapy? Could we even know what that meant?

• If “AI” was sentient, could it be trusted? Could it trust us? How would either of those come about?

• If “AI” was sentient, could it be culpable in the commission of crimes? Could it be tried? What would constitute punishment?

• If “AI” was sentient, how would religion tangle things? Might humans, or some particular human, be perceived as its god? Would there be special protections required for either those humans or the requests they make of the “AI” that opts to worship them? Is any part of this arrangement tax-exempt? Would any programs requested by such deities be protected under freedom of religion, as a way of doing what their gods ask for?

• And if “AI” was not sentient, but we just thought it was by mistake, what might that end up looking like for society?

Full Circle

And so I return to my original question: Why is business in such a hurry? Are we sure that the goal that “AI” is seeking will solve any of the problems that business thinks it has, problems that are causing it to prefer to replace people with “AI”?

For many decades now, we've wanted to have automation ease our lives. Is that what it's on track to do? It seems to be benefiting a few, and to be making the rest of us play a nasty game of musical chairs, or run ever faster on a treadmill, working harder for fewer jobs. All to satisfy a few. And after all that, will even they be happy?

And if real “AI” is ever achieved, not just as a marketing term, but as a real thing, who is prepared for that?

Is this what business investors wanted? Will sentient “AI” be any more desirable to employ than people are now?

Time to stop and think. And not with “AI” assistance. With our actual brains ourselves. What are we going after? And what is coming after us?

 

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Author's Notes:

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This essay came about in part because I feel that corporations were the first AI. I had written an essay about what Corporations Are Not People, which discussed the many questions that thinking of corporations as “legal people” should raise if one really took it seriously. So I thought I would ask some similar questions about “AI” and see where that led.

The graphic was produced using abacus.ai using Claude-Sonnet 3.7 and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra, then post-processing in Gimp.

Some Hurried Thoughts

Given that people aren't always mindful about what they do, sometimes almost preferring that people make suggestions they can just passively agree to, it's quite a responsibility to make really casual choices sometimes.

For example, in Facebook, the choice of metaphor where we call people “friends” if we connect to them socially there has some amazing ramifications. People dither endlessly about whether to “unfriend” someone, or they lament being “unfriended.” These follow from the choice, though, for the system to refer to these people as in fact friends, like we have in real life. It's a weighty decision to make someone a friend, and a lot of work to hold a friendship.

But what if Facebook had called them “guests” instead? What if the metaphor had been that of a dinner party? Would our expectations of them be different? They'd be the same people with the same capabilities. Would it seem like the same huge thing to disinvite someone, or to ask them to leave the party? People do this, and friendships survive. Also, people invite people who are not really full-fledged friends to a party. Our expectations guide us in weird ways. I've come to think of people I'm connected to on Facebook as my party guests, and it leaves me feeling freer to not worry it's so heavyweight to decide that maybe they weren't right for this party.

In fact, though, I wanted to talk about computer keyboards. There are some subtle and interesting influences there. Some keyboards have a notion of BACKSPACE or DELETE, as well as arrow keys. So people rush to make editing commands that make use of these. There isn't always just one single interpretation, so some keys are jump-off points for imagination.

I used to use Lisp Machines decades ago. Special computers that had support for the Lisp programming language in hardware. But they also had interesting keyboards that were evocative in various ways, with fanciful keys labeled SUSPEND, RESUME, ABORT, etc., as well as even stranger keys like ones with roman numerals (I through IV) or with thumbs pointing in various directions (up, down, left, right).

The SUSPEND key was interesting because it strongly suggested the need to suspend a program in the middle, that one might later RESUME. ABORT presumed you needed to stop things, as often the ESC (“Escape”) key does on conventional keyboards. Prominently featured metaphors that made one want to make their programs use them.

Though I often wondered why there was not a corresponding key marked HURRY. Ought stopping a program without intermediate results be the only way to stop them? A lot of programming technology concerns itself with various ways to communicate stopping a program that's running, but always it's assumed that it has to give up on the idea of a graceful answer if you stop prematurely.

For example, there's a technique in graphics called interlacing where when sending a large image, the bits are sent in an order so that you can start to see the image early in fuzzy form and as more bits are received you can display it in crisper and crisper detail. It seemed to me that there might be occasions where you got tired of waiting for a download and pressed hurry to say “stop gracefully, the fuzzy image is fine.” This technique is perhaps not as relevant now that networks have gotten faster, but when first developed was quite important, and anyway I'm just offering it as a way to illustrate that there can be notions of partial results.

Or you might be doing a search and know that something has searched half of something and is waiting to the end to report results but you just want to see what's done so far, so again you could say HURRY and maybe get partial results instead of the full results.

If output is only to the screen, there's little difference between the abort and hurry concepts I'm describing, but if it's an API that returns a structural value, aborting usually means not returning a value, so having a way to interrupt in a way that caused the running program to return a well-structured partial result instead might create some different interaction styles. Here's a sketch in Python:

from collections import namedtuple

class HurryException(BaseException):
  """
  An exception that could be connected to
  a Hurry key interrupt, if we had such a thing.
  """
  pass
  
searchresult = namedtuple('searchresult', 'found,complete')
    
def hurryable_search(tester, collection_to_search):
  found = []
  complete = False
  try:
    for x in collection_to_search:
      if tester(x):
        found.append(x)
    complete = True
  except HurryException:
    pass  # Allow what may be a partial search
  return searchresult(found=found, complete=complete)
  
def hurry_up():
  try:
    raise HurryException()
  except Exception:
    # If there's no handler, then don't hurry after all.
    pass

Note that there are other possible implementations that, rather than raising an exception, might just dynamically adjust a parameter that controlled the degree of care taken on a search step. I'm not suggesting a specific strategy, just that such strategies exist.

And I could be wrong about the particular examples I've chosen being good ideas. Maybe they aren't the best illustrations. But I'm in a hurry to finish this essay and they were what I came up with in the time I alloted myself, before I told myself to just hurry up and go with what I had.

What I'm really trying to say is that I think the absence of a HURRY key on the keyboard means people mostly don't give a second thought to this question of whether programs should be possible to ask to “hurry up.” People just assume that if the key isn't there, the functionality is probably not needed from the keyboard. In effect, they assume the key is not there for a good reason. But maybe it's just an accident or a failure of imagination.

So, just to estate something I said already, but now that you have a bit more context: We spend a lot of time passively accepting that these metaphors we are offered, whether in terms of models of interaction or markings on a keyboard, are the right way to think about things. And we spend far too little time asking ourselves if they're the wrong metaphor or if some interesting metaphor has been omitted. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.

It's a small point. But I figured if I said it out loud, you might end up passively accepting that it's something you really should think about.

 

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Author's Notes:

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The Suspend/Resume/Abort image is cropped from a photo I took of my own Lisp Machine's keyboard.

The HURRY image was generated at abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra. Light post-processing was done with Gimp.

Technology's Ethical Two-Step

1. Now. Delay incorporation of ethics. Let’s not muddy the waters in a way that holds back Progress.

2. Later. Deny incorporation of ethics. It’s too late. People have come to rely on things as they were built. It would be Disruptive to change now.

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I've said things vaguely like this for a long time, but I packaged it up crisply like this in a post on Mastodon, for which this is a mirror.

Original Keywords were described as: “Ethics, Tech, Technology, Society. Presently very relevant to, but not exclusive to: AI, ML, LLM, GPT, ChatGPT.”

I made a later edit to this post to add a graphic, ironically generated by Abacus.AI's GPT-4o ChatLLM chatbot calling out to FLUX.1. The prompt was "make me a black and white image that depicts sketch of two entities engaged in a ballroom dance, one a man and his partner a robot."

Children of the Information Era

“Now you see it … Now You don't.”

Probably most people know, because so many web sites ask about it when you register, that there is special protection on the web for US children under the age of 13. Quoting the FTC's explainer page on the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule ("COPPA"):

“COPPA imposes certain requirements on operators of websites or online services directed to children under 13 years of age, and on operators of other websites or online services that have actual knowledge that they are collecting personal information online from a child under 13 years of age.”

So we in the US have a sort of right to privacy on the web. OK, not a right, exactly, but at least a strong law. But there's just one small hitch: it expires as we get older. What is that about?

Why should it be OK for that right to go away as we get older. Whose interest does that serve? Certainly not mine. What kind of values are encoded here? What message does that send?

I'm sure this was sold to Congress, and then to the American people, under the tried and true “for the children” banner and that lawmakers didn't stop to think very hard about how much many of us adults would have loved to have at least the option of similar protection.

But it was not to be.

Why?

Ethics and Technology

People like me who've watched and rewatched Star Trek for decades are regularly reminded, as one of its common themes, that technology and wisdom need to move hand in hand. When technology gets ahead of wisdom, bad things happen. But Star Trek mostly takes place in the 23^rd and 24^th centuries.

Ethics has had a very hard time in our 20^th and now 21^st century technological society. Really there's very little ethics built into anything technological. There's an explanation for that and it comes in two steps.

Early on, technologists anxious to explore a topic insist it would “hold back progress” to weigh them down with ethical concerns, as if the worst thing in the world would be having to think about the impact of technology on society.

Later, if you try to apply ethics to a more mature technology, the punch line of the joke on us is trotted out: It's too late. “It would be disruptive to the market” to impose ethics—now that the market is used to doing to us whatever it's doing that profits someone.

Growing Up in the Information Era

Of course there's another possible explanation for why this privacy “right” goes poof and vanishes at age 13: By that age we have “grown up.”

We'll ignore for the moment that 13 is not the ordinary line between childhood and adulthood. But probably some business somewhere stood to lose too much money if we drew the line between childhood and adulthood in the right place. Though I'm sure the official party line was that kids needed time to swim in the deep end while there were still adults around to help them. Or something like that.

I'm not buying any such sophistry, though.

After all, what is adulthood? Why do we even make a distinction in society between how we treat children and how we treat adults?

Wikipedia suggests this about adulthood:

“In contrast to a ‘minor’, a legal adult is a person who has attained the age of majority and is therefore regarded as independent, self-sufficient, and responsible.”

Implicit in this is the notion that there are people—often but not necessarily parents, but usually at least other adults—training one for this role of independence, of self-sufficiency, of responsibility. And why? Well, because they've been around awhile. They're native guides familiar with how adulthood plays out. They can tell children what to watch out for because they've lived in the adult world for a whlie and have seen the pitfalls.

And that's the problem. This theory might work OK for learning to drive a car. Cars change a little each year, but mostly driving a car is the same today as it was decades ago, hopefully a little safer. Adults know what to teach kids about driving a car because they've done it awhile. They know the landscape.

But the information landscape is just different. You may give up a piece of information, like your location, and think it quite benign. It's never caused you a problem before. But there are people whose job it is to infer new information all the time from old information. That data is a treasure chest for companies to mine, so the implications of giving it away are not known to your parents. They maybe, if they're really paying attention, know what a given piece of information was used for in the past, but every day there are new things being inferred. Not just new ways to track us in the future, but new ways to understand data already obtained.

I'll say it this way to be most clear: There are no adults in the information society. There is no one who can take their lifetime, or even their last 20 years, and tell you what the next 20 years will feel like. Society has always changed from generation to generation, but it's happening faster and faster, to the point that we are really all just children, bumbling our way through the implications of the world that is being re-made before us. There are not a lot of adults with worked experience in the information age they can share with their children, not really. Not in the sense that there are adults who can help kids learn to cook dinner or play a piano or drive.

We are all children in the rapid-paced world of information that dominates today. There are effectively no adults who have lived this life before and are competent to prepare the next generation for that role. The informational life that any previous generation lived is a life that has already vanished by the time the next generation comes along.

The right to informational privacy should not expire as we grow up because there's no sense in which we can usefully reach “informational maturity” until we change the aspect of society in which we're willing to let technology far outpace wisdom, with ethics left far behind, lost in the dust.

Given that we are all really just children in this information era, adulthood not an easily attainable concept, we all deserve the protections that we today afford only to those under age 13. Our right to privacy should not suddenly expire.

Control at some point should pass from parent to child, but it should not just pass to the market. We should demand to hold it ourselves for our entire lifetime.

 

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