The emerging question is whether AI is unacceptably encroaching upon highly regulated professions, such as medicine, legal, financial, and accounting services—the typical professionals you’d think of who have to undergo years of special schooling with specific graduate degrees, certifications and licensing, testing, training and apprenticeships before they service the public with their practice.
AI platforms promote inquiries on these subjects, but there is harm in getting bad advice. Would you go to an unlicensed, disbarred, or repeatedly disciplined doctor, lawyer, accountant, financial planner, or take advice from an incompetent one? It shouldn’t be accessible with a few clicks, right? Professionals have mandatory requirements for continuing education and standards for quality service and ethical conduct. AI does not. So there arises a public policy question of individual liberty versus public safety.
On the one hand, individuals should be free to make their own (stupid) decisions and choices and thereby assume their own risk. On the other hand, the public pays the cost of bad choices in the aggregate and we as a society can agree on a reasonable threshold to reduce the risk of common harm–in this case preventing AI from doling out professional advice.
An analogy is motorcycle helmet laws. 47 states have some form of motorcycle helmet law, while 3 states have no motorcycle helmet law at all (Illinois, Iowa, and New Hampshire) and Florida has a partial law.
What do you think?
Geoffrey Gilbert
Reference: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chatgpt-dangerous-medical-advice-openai-lawsuit/