Limit AI now or humanity will lose its agency, says Nobel laureate Ressa

Artificial intelligence (AI), having hijacked humanity’s attention through social media and our biology by manipulating our need for intimacy, will take away our agency unless we legislate now to limit it, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa said.

The Filipino and US journalist, who jointly won the 2021 award in part for her work documenting the power of large tech companies, serves as co-chair of the UN’s international scientific panel on AI, tasked with assessing how AI is transforming lives worldwide.

Ressa said citizens must campaign for regulation on AI to put pressure on politicians to introduce legislation.

“It is not a freedom of speech issue to ask for regulation. It’s a public safety issue,” said the co-founder and CEO of news outlet Rappler, a Reuters client.

“I think we’re at that phase where if this doesn’t happen, we will tip; [it] will be beyond our control if we don’t step in now,” she said in an interview during a visit to Oslo to speak at a conference on threats against democracies.

“Artificial intelligence is neither artificial nor intelligent. It’s been around for about 70 years, and there have been three waves that have already hit the public,” she said.

She described the first phase as social media platforms capturing attention, polarising societies and isolating individuals in the process.

“The second phase was hacking our biology, again through intimacy: the chatbots,” Ressa said. “And then the last one is agency itself, through agentic and multi-agentic AI, the frontier models that are creating these machines that don’t just pretend to be human but act for us.”

Some critics, including US President Donald Trump, have rejected industry calls to regulate AI over fears of losing the AI race to China. Ressa dismissed that argument as “good spin”.

“China actually puts more safeguards in place for its citizens than Silicon Valley does for the rest of the world. If you’re on TikTok, the version of TikTok that is in China has age restrictions,” she said.

Speaking before Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on AI companies to slow the rate at which they advance model capabilities amid mounting fears of misuse of AI, Ressa said the first step to bring about change is to make tech companies accountable.

“The first one [step] is to actually make the companies responsible for the damage they’ve done,” she said, welcoming the US lawsuits that led Meta Platforms to pay up to $18bn (R292.55bn) over the next decade and strictly limit how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram.

We know this is harmful, so you should remove the addictive features, not just for teenagers, but for all of us

She welcomed moves by the EU and countries, led by Australia, to put age limits on social media but said it does not tackle the “fundamental flaw” that the tools developed by tech companies are also addictive for adults.