Gratitude & Optimism
Martin Tisné ·
With tremendous gratitude, I am pleased to announce my appointment as CEO of the newly created AI Collaborative, an Initiative of The Omidyar Group.
The Al Collaborative was created to help regulate artificial intelligence based on democratic values and principles and ensure the public has a voice in Al regulation.
We are in an exciting moment: we benefit from the learnings of the past ten years with social media, the incredible work done in AI ethics, and now have an opportunity to apply these at a moment where the eyes of the world are on AI, and politicians and policy-makers are looking for answers.
We cannot afford to repeat the mistakes made in not regulating social media early enough in the 2010s, before the infrastructure (e.g. ad-driven business models based on personal data) was set in.
We have the opportunity, today, to create a governance model worthy of AI’s promise and challenges.
I am mindful that this window of opportunity will close. The question I ask myself, ask all of us is – what will we regret not having done, looking back ten years from now?
Will we move soon enough to build a regulatory infrastructure that provides necessary, protective guardrails or will we miss the moment as we did with social media? Will our approach ensure all voices are heard and assert democratic control over key, life-shaping technologies that are almost exclusively developed and controlled by the private sector?
AI is political, it reflects the values, mindset, and worldview of its creators. We need to bend AI to a democratic vision, values, and be resolutely outcomes-based in our approach to regulation from the start.
As we launch the AI Collaborative, I am optimistic that we can avoid the mistakes and grasp the missed opportunities of the past, and I am eager to do our part in helping:
- regulate AI based on democratic values and principles;
- ensure the public, and not solely the private sector, has a voice in fast-moving AI regulation; and
- drive greater and more effective funding into the AI governance field through external partnerships.