Decoder: Barack Obama on AI, Free Speech, and the Future of the Internet

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0:58Hi, everyone. I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway. Today, we're bringing you a special episode of Decoder, Neelay Patel's recent conversation with former President Barack Obama. The two talked about AI and the role of that free speech in government regulation play, topics we've been talking about a lot on Pivot lately. And while this is a serious conversation, there's a lighter moment when President Obama is asked about his iPhone home screen and which four apps he has in that dock at the bottom. Scott, I'm curious, what are your four apps? Anything interesting? Well, hold on. you porn and caviar but let me get this you get the head of diversity and inclusion from the forestry service and neil i gets obama i know i had obama i interviewed obama my favorite apps um i love i hate to i have this new app called wheelie and i use caviar when i'm in new york it's kind of a high-end uber it's like douche uber douber okay yeah uh what else do i use i I guess that's about it.

1:54I don't use, oh, Spotify. I love Spotify. I have mail, messages, phone, and settings on my four apps at the bottom. That's what I have. Oh, you mean at the bottom? That's who you actually use. Okay. That's different. But I like that wheelie and I use, those are good ones. Those are nice ones. And my stock market app. I don't even know what that's called. Does it even have a name? It's stocks. It's stocks. Stocks. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, I don't use Twitter's back in some file. Now I have news apps. I have my news apps and threads actually near the top too. Anyway, and weather, obviously. CNN.

2:27I'm sorry, CNN. CNN. Okay, good. Well, good, good, good, good, good. Anyway, enjoy the episode, everyone. And happy Thanksgiving. Are you doing Thanksgiving in London, Scott? No, I'm actually doing it in Florida. I'm really excited. I'm going to go see friends. It's going to be great. Cool. Some weather, some warm weather, sand. Anyway, while Scott's sunning himself on the Florida beaches, we'll be back next week with more Pivot. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. We've got a good one today. I'm talking to former President Barack Obama about AI, social networks, and how to think about democracy as both of those things collide.

3:06I sat down with Obama last week at his offices in Washington, D.C., just hours after President Biden signed a sweeping executive order about AI. That order covers quite a bit, from labeling AI-generated content to coming up with safety protocols for the companies working on the most advanced AI models. You'll hear Obama say he's been talking to the Biden administration and leaders across the tech industry about AI and how best to regulate it. And he has a particularly unique experience here, since President Obama is one of the most deepfaked people in the entire world. You'll also hear him say that he joined our show because he wanted to reach you, the Decoder audience, and get you all thinking about these problems.

3:46One of Obama's worries is that the government needs insight and expertise to properly regulate AI. And you'll hear him make a pitch for why people with that expertise should take a tour of duty in the government to make sure we get these things right. We're going to get right into it, but some notes before we start. My idea here was to talk to Obama, the constitutional law professor, more than Obama, the politician. So this one got wonky fast. You'll hear him mention Nazis and Skokie. That's a reference to a famous Supreme Court case from the 70s where the ACLU argued that the town of Skokie, Illinois, banning a Nazi group from marching was a violation of the First Amendment.

4:23You'll hear me get excited about a case called Red Lion v. FCC, a 1969 Supreme Court decision that said the government could impose something called the Fairness Doctrine on radio and television broadcasters because the public owns the airwaves and can thus impose requirements on how they're used. There's no similar framework for cable TV or the internet, which don't use public airwaves. And that makes them much harder, if not impossible, to regulate. Obama says he disagrees with the idea that social networks are something called common carriers that have to distribute all information equally.

4:56That's an idea floated most notably by Justice Clarence Thomas in a 2021 concurrence, and which forms the basis of laws regulating social media in Texas and Florida. Those laws are currently headed to the Supreme Court for review. Lastly, Obama says he talked to a tech executive who told him the best comparison to AI's impact on the world would be electricity. And you'll hear me say that I have to guess who it is. So here's my guess. It's Google's Sundar Pichai, who has been saying AI is more profound than electricity or fire since 2018. But that's my guess. You all take a listen. Let me know what you think.

5:33Oh, and one more thing. I definitely asked Obama what apps were on his home screen. I mean, come on. You would have done the same thing. Okay. President Barack Obama. Here we go.

5:54President Barack Obama, you're the 44th president of the United States. We're here at the Obama Foundation. Welcome to Decoder. It is great to be here. Thank you for having me. I am really excited to talk to you. There's a lot to talk about. Yeah. So we are here on the occasion of President Biden signing an executive order about AI. I would describe this order as sweeping. I think it's over 100 pages long. There's a lot of ideas in it. Right. Everything from regulating biosynthesis with AI. There's some safety regulations in there. It mandates something called red teaming, transparency, watermarking.

6:23These feel like new challenges, like very new challenges for the government's relationship with technology. I want to start with a decoder question. What is your framework for thinking about these challenges and how you evaluate them? This is something that I've been interested in for a while. So back in 2015, 2016, as we were watching the landscape transformed by social media and the information revolution impacting every aspect of our lives, I started getting in conversations about artificial intelligence and this next phase, this next wave that might be coming. And I think one of the lessons that we got from the transformation of our media landscape was that incredible innovation, incredible promise, incredible good can come out of it.

7:13But there are a bunch of unintended consequences. And that we have to be maybe a little more intentional about how our democracies interact with what is primarily being generated out of the private sector. and what rules of the road are we setting up and how can we make sure that we maximize the good and maybe minimize some of the bad. So I commissioned my science guy, John Holdren, along with John Podesta, who had been a former chief of staff and worked on climate change issues. Let's pull together some experts to figure this out. And we issued a big report in my last year. The interesting thing even then was people felt enormously promising technology, but we may be overhyping how quick it's going to come.

8:06And as we've seen just in the last year or two, even those who are developing these large language models who are in the weeds with these programs are starting to realize this thing is moving faster and is potentially even more powerful than we originally imagined. So my framework and in conversations with government officials, private sector, academics, the framework I emerged from is that this is going to be a transformative technology. It's already in all kinds of small ways, but very broadly changing the shape of our economy in some ways, even our search engines. basic stuff that we take for granted is already operating under some AI principles, but this is going to be turbocharged.

8:58It's going to impact how we make stuff, how we deliver services, how we get information, and the potential for us to have enormous medical breakthroughs, the potential for us to be able to provide individualized tutoring for kids in remote areas, the potential for us to solve some of our energy challenges and deal with greenhouse gases. This could unlock amazing innovation, but that it can also do some harm. We can end up with powerful AI models in the hands of somebody in a basement who develops a new smallpox variant or, you know, non-state actors who suddenly, because of a powerful AI tool, can hack into critical infrastructure.

9:48Or maybe less dramatically, AI infiltrating the lives of our children in ways that we didn't intend, in some cases the way social media has. So, what that means then is, is that I think the government, as an expression of our democracy, needs to be aware of what's going on. Those who are developing these frontier systems need to be transparent. I don't believe that we should try to put the genie back in the bottle and be anti-tech because of all the enormous potential. But I think we should put some guardrails around some risks that we can anticipate and have enough flexibility that it doesn't destroy innovation, but also is guiding and steering this technology in a way that maximizes not just individual company profits, but also the public good.

10:48So let me make the comparison for you. I would say the problem in tech regulation for the past 15 years has been social media. How do we regulate social media? How do we get more good stuff, less bad stuff, make sure that really bad stuff is illegal? You came to the presidency on the back of social media. I was the first digital president. You had a BlackBerry, I remember. People were very excited about your BlackBerry. I wrote a story about your iPad. That was transformative. That's young people are going to take to the political environment. They're going to use these tools. We're going to change America with it.

11:18You can make an argument. I wouldn't have been elected had it not been for social networks. Now we're on the other side of that. There was another guy who got elected on the back of social networks. There was another movement in America that has been very negative on the back of that election. Right. We have basically failed to regulate social networks, I'd say. There's no comprehensive privacy bill even. Right. There was already a framework for regulating media in this country. We could apply a lot of what we knew about should we have good media to social networks. Right. There are some First Amendment questions in there, what have you, important ones, but there was an existing framework.

11:51Right. With AI, it's we're going to tell computers to do stuff, and they're going to go do it. Right. We hope. We have no framework for that. We hope they do what we think we're telling them to do. We also have, we ask computers a question. They might just confidently lie to us or help us lie at scale. There is no framework for that. What do you think you can pull from the sort of failure to regulate social media into this new environment such that we get it right this time? Or do anything at all? Well, this is part of the reason why I think what the Biden administration did today in putting out the EO, the work they've done is so important.

12:29Not because it's the end point, but because it's really the beginning of building out a framework. When you mentioned how this executive order has a bunch of different stuff in it, what that reflects is we don't know all the problems that are going to arise out of this. We don't know all the promising potential of AI, but we're starting to put together sort of the foundations for what we hope will be a smart framework for dealing with it. In some cases, what AI is going to do is to accelerate advances in, let's say, medicine. We've already seen, for example, with things like protein folding and the breakthroughs that can take place that would not have happened had it not been for some of these AI tools.

13:26And we want to make sure that that's done safely. We want to make sure that it's done responsibly. And it may be that we already have some laws in place that can manage that. There may be some novel developments in AI where an existing agency, an existing law just doesn't work. If we're dealing with the alignment problem and we want to make sure that some of these large language models where even the developers aren't entirely confident about what these models are doing, what the computer's thinking or doing. Well, in that case, we're going to have to figure out what are the red teaming, what are the testing regiments.

14:07And in talking to the companies themselves, they will acknowledge that their safety protocols and their testing regiments, et cetera, may not be where they need to be yet. And I think it's entirely appropriate then for us to say, to plant a flag and say, all right, frontier companies, you need to disclose what your safety protocols are to make sure that we don't have rogue programs going off and hacking into in our financial system, for example. Tell us what tests you're using. Make sure that we have some independent verification that right now this stuff is working. but that framework can't be a fixed framework because these models are developing so quickly that oversight and any regulatory framework is going to have to be flexible and it's going to have to be nimble.

15:00And by the way, it's also going to require some really smart people who understand how these programs and these models are working, not just in the companies themselves, but also in the nonprofit sector and in government, which is why I was glad to see that the Biden administration, part of the executive order, is specifically calling on a bunch of hotshot young people who are interested in AI to do a stint outside of the companies themselves and go work for government for a while, go work with some of the research institutes that are popping up in places like the Harvard Lab or the Stanford AI Center and some other nonprofits, because we're going to need to make sure that everybody can have confidence that whatever journey we're on here with AI, that it's not just being driven by a few people without any kind of interaction or voice from ordinary folks, regular people who are going to be using these products and impacted by these products.

16:11We have to take a quick break. When we're back, President Obama and I talk about how regulation should shape the future of AI.

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17:29We're back with President Barack Obama talking about the importance of AI regulation. There's ordinary folks and there's the people who are building it who need to go help write regulations. And there's a split there. The conventional wisdom in the Valley for years is the government is too slow. It doesn't understand technology. And by the time it actually writes a functional rule, the technology was aiming to regulate will be obsolete. This is markedly different, right? The AI doomers are the ones asking for regulation the most. The big companies have asked for regulation. Sam Altman has toured the capitals of the world politely asking to be regulated.

18:05Why do you think there's such a fervor for that regulation? Is it just incumbents wanting to cement their position? Well, look, you're raising an important point, which is, and rightly, there's some suspicion, I think, among some people that, yeah, these companies want regulation because they want to lock out competition. And as you know, historically, sort of a central principle of tech culture has been open source. We want everything out there. Everybody's able to play with models and applications and create new products. And that's how innovation happens. Here, regulation starts looking like, well, maybe we start having closed systems and the big frontier companies, Microsofts, the Googles, the OpenAIs, Anthropics, that they're going to somehow lock us out.

19:00But in my conversations with the tech leaders on this, I think there is, for the first time, some genuine humility because they are seeing the power that these models may have. I talked to one executive, and look, there's no shortage of hyperbole in the tech world, right? But this is a pretty sober guy, like an adult. Now I have to guess who it is. who's seen a bunch of these cycles and been through boom and bust. And I asked him, I said, well, when you say this technology you think is going to be transformative, give me sort of some analogy. He said, you know, I sat with my team and we talked about it.

19:45And after going around and around, what we decided was maybe the best analogy was electricity. And I thought, well, yeah, electricity, that was a pretty big deal. And if that's the case, I think what they recognize is it's in their own commercial self-interest that there's not some big screw up on this. If in fact it is as transformative as they expect it to be, having some rules, some protections that create a competitive field, allow everybody to participate, come up with new products, compete on price, compete on functionality, but that none of us are taking such big risks. Yeah. There's a view in the valley.

20:27thing blows up in our faces. I do think that there is sincere concern that if we just have an unfettered race to the bottom, that this could end up choking off the goose that might be laying a bunch of golden eggs. There is the view in the Valley, though, that any constraint on technology is bad. Yeah, and I disagree with that. Any caution, any principle where you might slow down is the enemy of progress. And the net good is better if we just race that as fast as possible? In fairness, that's not just in the Valley. That's in every business I know. It's not like Wall Street loves regulation. It's not as if manufacturers are really keen for government to micromanage how they produce goods.

21:09But one of the things that we've learned, you know, through the industrial age and the information age over the last century is that you can overregulate. You can have over-bureaucratized things, but that if you have smart regulations that set some basic goals and standards, making sure you're not creating products that are unsafe to consumers, making sure that if you're selling food, people who go in the grocery store can trust that they're not going to die from salmonella or E. coli. Making sure that if somebody buys a car, that the brakes work. Making sure that if I take my electric whatever and I plug it into a socket anywhere, any place in the country, that it's not going to shock me and blow up on my face.

22:05It turns out all those various rules, standards, actually create marketplaces and are good for business. And innovation then develops around those rules. So it's not an argument that I think part of what happens in the tech community is the sense that we're smarter than everybody else. And these people slowing us down are impeding rapid progress. and when you look at the history of innovation, it turns out that having some smart guideposts around which innovation takes place not only doesn't slow things down, in some cases, it actually raises standards and accelerates progress. There were a bunch of folks who said, look, you're gonna kill the automobile if you put airbags in there.

22:55Well, it turns out actually people figured out, you know what, we can actually put airbags in there and make them safer. And over time, the costs go down and everybody's better off. There's a really difficult part in this EO about provenance. Yeah. Watermarking content, making sure people can see it's AI generated. You are among the most deep faked people in the world. Oh, absolutely. Well, because what I realized when I left office, I'd probably been filmed and recorded more than any human in history just because I happened to be the first president when the smartphone came out. I'm assuming you have some very deep personal feelings about being depicting this way.

23:35There's a big First Amendment issue here, right? I can use Photoshop one way and the government doesn't say I have to put a label on it. I use it a slightly different way. The government's going to show up and tell Adobe, you've got to put a label on this. How do you square that circle? It seems very challenging to me. I think this is going to be an iterative process. I don't think you're going to be able to create a blanket rule. But the truth is that's been how our governance of information, media, speech, that's how it's developed for a couple hundred years now. With each new technology, we have to adapt and figure out some new rules of the road.

24:15So let's take my example. a deep fake of me that is used for political satire or just to, you know, somebody doesn't like me and they want to deep fake me. I was the president of the United States and there are some pretty formidable rules that have been set up to protect people from making fun of public figures. I'm a public figure. And what you are doing to me as a public figure is different than what you do to a 13-year-old girl, a freshman in high school. So we're going to treat that differently. And that's okay. We should have different rules for public figures than we do for private citizens.

24:58We should have different rules for what is clearly sort of political commentary and satire versus cyberbullying or— Where do you think those rules land? Do they land on individuals? Do they land on the people making the tools like Adobe or Google? Do they land on the distribution networks like Facebook? Yeah, my suspicion is how responsibility is allocated, we're going to have to sort out. But I think the key thing to understand is—and look, I taught constitutional law. I'm close to a First Amendment absolutist in the sense that I generally don't believe that even offensive speech, mean speech, et cetera, should be certainly not regulated by the government.

25:46And I'm even game to argue that on social media platforms, et cetera, that the default position should be free speech rather than censorship. I agree with all that. But keep in mind, we've never had completely free speech, right? We have laws against child pornography. We have laws against human trafficking. We have laws against certain kinds of speech that we deem to be really harmful to the public health and welfare. the courts when they evaluate that they say you know they come up with a whole bunch of time place manner restrictions that may be acceptable in some cases aren't acceptable in others you get a bunch of case law that develops there's arguments about it in the public square we may disagree should nazis be able to protest in skokie well you know that's a tough one but you know, we can figure this out.

26:50And that I think is how this is going to develop. I do believe that the platforms themselves are more than just common carriers like the phone company. They're not passive. There's always some content moderation taking place. And so once that line has been crossed, it's perfectly reasonable for the broader society to say, well, We don't want to just leave that entirely to a private company. I think we need to at least know how you're making those decisions, what things you might be amplifying through your algorithm and what things you aren't. And it may be that what you're doing isn't illegal, but we should at least be able to know how some of these decisions are made.

27:37I think it's going to be that kind of process that takes place. What I don't agree with is the large tech platform suggesting somehow that we want to be treated entirely as a common carrier and like we're just classic here. It's the parents' Thomas view, right? Yeah, but on the other hand, we know you're selling advertising based on the idea that you're making a bunch of decisions about your products. Well, this is very challenging, right? If you say you're a common carrier, then you are, in fact, regulating them. You're saying you can't make any decisions. You say you are exercising editorial control.

28:14They are protected by the First Amendment. Yes. And then regulations get very, very difficult. Right. It feels like even with AI, when we talk about content generation with AI or with social networks, we run right into the First Amendment over and over again. And most of our approaches, this is what I worry about, is we try to get around it so we can make some speech regulations without saying we're going to make some speech regulations. Copyright law is the most effective speech regulation on the internet because everyone will agree, okay, Disney owns that, bring it down. Well, because there's property involved.