#AI #GenerativeAI #USA #AIRegulation: "All of the experts I spoke with agreed that the tech companies themselves shouldn’t be able to declare their own products safe. Otherwise, there is a substantial risk of “audit washing”—in which a dangerous product gains legitimacy from a meaningless stamp of approval, Ellen Goodman, a law professor at Rutgers, told me. Although numerous proposals currently call for after-the-fact audits, others have called for safety assessments to start much earlier. The potentially high-stakes applications of AI mean that these companies should “have to prove their products are not harmful before they can release them into the marketplace,” Safiya Noble, an internet-studies scholar at UCLA, told me.
Clear benchmarks and licenses are also crucial: A government standard would not be effective if watered down, and a hodgepodge of safety labels would breed confusion to the point of being illegible, similar to the differences among free-range, cage-free, and pasture-raised eggs."