Security News > 2024 > February > How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
As early as 2018, the powerful foundation models powering cutting-edge applications like chatbots have been called "Frontier AI." In previous decades, the internet itself was considered an electronic frontier.
Turner grappled with some of the negative consequences and contradictions of the frontier ethic and how it shaped American democracy.
Theodore Roosevelt wrote extensively and explicitly about how the frontier and his conception of white supremacy justified expansion to points west and, through the prosecution of the Spanish-American War, far across the Pacific.
Like the western frontier in the nineteenth century, the maniacal drive to unlock progress via advancement in AI can become a justification for political and economic expansionism and an excuse for racial oppression.
We can already see this kind of boundary pushing happening with AI. Modern frontier AI models are trained using data, often copyrighted materials, with untested legal justification.
While the Biden administration has used its executive authority and federal purchasing power to exert some limited control over AI, the gap left by lack of legislation leaves AI in the US looking like the Wild West-a largely unregulated frontier.