--- title: Humans Need to Oversee the AI Monitoring the Internet description: Former TIME Editor-in-Chief Nancy Gibbs makes the case for humans in the age of AI. canonical: https://time.com/6324817/managing-ai-social-media-disinformation/ author: Nancy Gibbs article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-10-17T19:38:13.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:45:40.131Z article:section: Ideas og:title: It Will Take More Than Robots to Manage the Robots og:description: The case for humans in the age of AI. og:url: https://time.com/6324817/managing-ai-social-media-disinformation/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt82ccd4934adcaa0e/698a4150b21a9c22e4507aa5/GettyImages-1358939134.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3648 og:image:height: 2052 og:image:alt: TIME Person of the Year og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: It Will Take More Than Robots to Manage the Robots twitter:description: The case for humans in the age of AI. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt82ccd4934adcaa0e/698a4150b21a9c22e4507aa5/GettyImages-1358939134.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 video:duration: 02:22 video:published: 2023-09-06 section: tech topics: artificial intelligence, AI adoption concerns, fraud and opportunism, attention economy, generic media production, bias minimization, privacy, AI transparency, regulation, self-driving cars, ethics in innovation genre: interview, panel discussion tones: cautious, thoughtful, concerned, measured emotions: concern (high), caution (medium), hope (low) sentiment: negative audience: technology professionals, policymakers, AI researchers, general public interested in AI organizations: TIME products: self-driving cars transcript_source: publisher captions transcript_reviewed: not applicable ---  # It Will Take More Than Robots to Manage the Robots > Sponsored content. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=53674459-c7b5-4cf7-a5fb-50f249296af3&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) ## Video: What Keeps These TIME100 AI Innovators Up At Night? [Watch (HLS stream): What Keeps These TIME100 AI Innovators Up At Night?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/WQzLkDuX.m3u8) (2:22)  _Published 2023-09-06. TIME100 AI Innovators on the concerns they have for the adoption of AI going forward._ Description, summary, key points, chapters, key quotes, questions and transcript, where present, were produced automatically from the video or its captions and were not reviewed. ## Summary TIME100 AI Innovators share the concerns that keep them up at night about the adoption of AI. They discuss opportunism and fraud, where people exaggerate the capabilities of AI systems, and the attention economy, where cheap, generic media could be amplified by large audiences. They also call for minimizing bias, protecting privacy, keeping AI decision-making transparent, and balancing innovation with ethical considerations so AI serves the greater good. ## Key points - A speaker expects a lot of opportunism and fraud, with people claiming AI capabilities far beyond what they actually are. (00:11) - Discerning judgment about claims made regarding AI is described as important for people to be thoughtful about these things. (00:30) - Opportunism is expected to set the field and ultimately set society back quite a bit. (00:35) - Declining cost and skill needed to produce generic media is a concern, made worse by these dynamics. (00:49) - Media figures or influencers could become best-selling authors, painters, or music producers by combining a large audience with access to aggregated human knowledge. (00:56) - Failing to develop more mindful approaches to attention games is cited as a worry about where society is headed. (01:06) - A speaker says that regulation should help when a self-driving car company is involved, so that the technology works for everyone. (01:37) - Minimizing bias, upholding privacy, making AI decision-making processes transparent, and balancing innovation with ethical considerations are named as priorities to guarantee AI is used for the greater good. (02:01) ## Chapters - [00:00 to 00:56] Fraud and opportunism around AI claims. Speakers warn about opportunists exaggerating AI capabilities and the need for a discerning eye about such claims. - [00:56 to 01:23] Attention economy and generic media concerns. A speaker worries that lower cost and skill to produce media, combined with large audiences, could reshape creative fields and attention games. - [01:23 to 01:37] Scale of people affected by AI systems. A speaker contrasts billions of people on the planet with a much smaller group, emphasizing the need for care in building systems. - [01:37 to 02:22] Regulation, bias, privacy, and transparency. Speakers call for regulation, minimized bias, upheld privacy, transparent AI processes, and a balance between innovation and ethics for the greater good. ## Key quotes - [00:11] TIME100 AI Innovator: "I think there's going to be a lot of opportunism and fraud" - [00:30] TIME100 AI Innovator: "it's going to be really important for us to have a Discerning Eye about the claims that people are making" - [00:35] TIME100 AI Innovator: "there will be opportunist and it will set the field and ultimately Society back quite a bit." - [00:56] TIME100 AI Innovator: "populace, media figures or influencers, could become the best-selling author painter. Music producers of all time" - [02:01] TIME100 AI Innovator: "We just really need to make sure that bias is minimized." - [02:19] TIME100 AI Innovator: "AI is used for the greater good." ## Questions this video answers - What concerns do TIME100 AI Innovators have about the adoption of AI? [00:11] - Why do speakers worry about fraud and exaggerated claims regarding AI? [00:21] - How could lower production costs and skill requirements affect media? [00:49] - What role could regulation play in AI development, such as for self-driving cars? [01:37] - What safeguards do speakers say are needed to ensure AI serves the greater good? [02:01]  by [Nancy Gibbs](https://time.com/author/nancy-gibbs/)  ## Nancy Gibbs Oct 17, 2023 7:38 PM UTC  Frances Haugen speaking at the TIME Person of the Year event on Dec. 13, 2021 in New York City. Frances Haugen speaking at the TIME Person of the Year event on Dec. 13, 2021 in New York City. Getty Images for TIME  by [Nancy Gibbs](https://time.com/author/nancy-gibbs/)  ## Nancy Gibbs Oct 17, 2023 7:38 PM UTC By now the sophistication of [false information](https://time.com/6323421/misinformation-about-the-israel-hamas-war-is-rife-on-social-media-especially-x/) about Israel and Hamas is clear to anyone who opened their phone this week. As tech platforms [rely ever more on artificial intelligence](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/13/meta-wikipedia-want-to-fight-misinformation-with-new-ai-tool-sphere.html) in their battle against disinformation, the havoc in the Middle East exposes the limits of technology to police technology’s harms. It is more important than ever that we understand how global platforms like Meta, Google, and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, make decisions about what content gets amplified and what taken down. “Just trust us” doesn’t cut it when they’re losing the battle against ever more well-armed propagandists. It’s not as though platforms didn’t know they had a huge disinformation problem that human content moderators alone could not solve. Two years ago, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen detailed for Congress how growth and profit drove decisions: "The result has been more division, more harm, more lies, more threats and more combat,” she testified. “In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people.” But Congress still can’t agree on basic guardrails for holding platforms accountable. My Harvard Kennedy School colleague, computer scientist Latanya Sweeney, estimates that within a year the internet as we’ve known it will have been supplanted by one where the vast majority of content comes from bots. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned as generative AI struts out of the lab and into our feeds and phones and lives, it is how confidently and flamboyantly it lies. We need a wider range of voices to address the responsibility platforms play in protecting the health of our information ecology. I don’t just mean technologists and psychologists, economists and ethicists, though all need a seat at the table: I mean both the ghosts and the machines. The people affected by these technologies in ways the people who built them did not foresee, need to be heard as well. ### More From TIME ## Archiving Facebook's internal documents It falls to the growing discipline of Public Interest Technology, cousin to Public Health and Public Interest Law, to advance research and shape debate over the [colonization of our public square](https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/19/1049592/artificial-intelligence-colonialism/) by private companies. With that challenge in mind, this week former President Barack Obama comes to Harvard for a summit on the future of the internet. Harvard Law School will launch a new [Applied Social Media Lab](https://asml.cyber.harvard.edu/) to “reimagine, rebuild, and reboot social media to serve the public good.” Meanwhile, at the Harvard Kennedy School, Sweeney’s Public Interest Technology Lab will release [FBArchive.org](https://fbarchive.org/), a new research platform that allows researchers and journalists to study the internal Facebook documents that Haugen shared. The major platforms operate as lead-lined vaults with blackout curtains. We know the harms that come out but still have little idea of decisions that go into them. Are content moderation guidelines consistently enforced, and if not, what exceptions are allowed and who has authority to grant them? How is international content moderation conducted? Is it primarily reliant on sophisticated AI algorithms, or does it depend on manual assessments by English speakers reviewing Google Translate results? Given all that is opaque about how tech platforms make decisions about privacy, content moderation, and algorithm design, FBarchive was built to provide some measure of transparency. Meta—Facebook's parent company—does a great deal of research about its products, including Facebook, and has vast data about the impact of changes to their design. The documents released by Haugen reveal, for instance, that moderators considered “tradeoff budgets,” so that even when demonstrably harmful content was proliferating in Ethiopia or Myanmar, Meta required that they calculate the financial costs before reducing the reach of such content or taking it down. The new online archive creates a space for people to add context and insights at scale, in a kind of collaborative research that would otherwise be impossible. It is just one example of the marriage of minds and machines, which protects individual privacy while allowing researchers to understand the tradeoffs facing business leaders who are balancing their responsibilities to the public and to their shareholders. ## Putting humans at the center This is what public interest technologists call “people-centered problem solving,” and it’s impossible to create a “public interest internet” without engaging the very human people who shape how the internet operates. Assuming Congress is unlikely to step into the breach any time soon, for the moment we have to rely on the judgment and even self interest of leaders of tech companies to agree on [shared industry standards](https://shorensteincenter.org/towards-digital-platforms-and-public-purpose/) that protect individual rights, our public goods, and information ecosystem—and, ultimately, to protect democracy. Twitter was once something of a model for sharing data and community standards—but not anymore. And the starting point has long been obvious: far greater transparency about how algorithms are engineered and how content decisions are made. That would grant researchers, journalists, judges, civil society, and policymakers more power to play their essential roles in shaping a healthy public square. Even as we marvel at the ability of our new robot friends to write a sonnet or predict how proteins fold, it’s worth remembering that without the experience and values humans bring to the equation, the solutions are likely to fail—especially when these technologies make it so much easier to dehumanize each other. ## Transcript [00:11] I think there's going to be a lot of opportunism and fraud [00:14] and there's a lot of people going around. [00:16] Now, claiming that they're building these incredible, [00:18] AI systems or the capabilities are far beyond what they are. [00:21] And and I think that's a real concern. [00:23] Especially when I die, you feel, it's like medicine or Thomas [00:26] vehicles. I think it's going to be really important for us to [00:30] have a Discerning Eye about the claims that people are making [00:34] it for people to be thoughtful about these things. [00:35] Because God will happen, there will be opportunist and it will [00:40] set the field and ultimately Society back quite a bit. [00:43] I think the attention economy has been my concern is that with [00:49] Jenna today. I driving on the cost and skill level necessary [00:52] to produce generic media. [00:53] These Dynamics, make it a lot worse, [00:56] populace, media figures or influencers, could become the best-selling [00:59] author painter. Music producers of all time by combining [01:03] a really large audience with access to aggregated human knowledge [01:06] on that subject. [01:06] If we don't develop more me, I need to attention games, [01:09] I worry where we're headed. [01:10] What keeps me up at night about Building Systems and Technology. [01:23] That is still four to seven billion people on the planet. [01:26] As opposed to knows a couple hundred thousand is the more careful. [01:33] We have to be the bigger. [01:37] So for instance, when you have a self-driving car company, [01:42] we should have some regulation help carrying a bunch of different [01:54] in order for it to work for everyone. [02:01] We just really need to make sure that bias is minimized. [02:05] Privacy is upheld the decision. [02:09] Making processes of AI are just truly transparent and we have [02:13] to strike a balance between Innovation and ethical considerations [02:16] so that we can truly guarantee. 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