Commentary
What happens when AI chatbot companies become intermediaries between users and law enforcement? Follow the incentives, discover the outcomes.
Ottawa’s new Digital Safety Act effectively regulates both chatbot inputs and outputs: what may be said in a chatbot, and what a chatbot may say. But faced with unclear obligations and penalties of up to 3 percent of gross global revenue, AI companies will have every incentive to avoid non-compliance by increasingly monitoring, assessing, and disclosing to police Canadians’ chatbot conversations.
Bill C-34 is the first piece of federal legislation to establish legal obligations for companies operating chatbot services, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, xAI’s Grok, and Google’s Gemini. On the surface, the Bill accomplishes exactly what many expected of their federal government following the Tumbler Ridge school shooting: regulating how AI companies manage chatbot conversations involving fantasies of violence….