Facebook Whistleblower Francis Hagen stated on Friday that artificial intelligence companies must “step up their efforts and comply” with the spirit of the self-regulation agreement reached with the White House. A few days prior to that, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other company executives signed this document.
"The history of tech companies dealing with regulators is such that when we are facing very flexible systems, they tend to strictly adhere to the written rules," Hogen said in an interview with CNBC's Squawk Box on Friday.
She questions whether these companies will adhere to the “spirit of the rules” or whether they will attempt to take advantage of those aspects that are not explicitly prohibited, “walking around the end of the fence.”
Haugen was once the product manager of a team that spread false information among Facebook citizens. In 2021, she leaked a batch of internal documents to The Wall Street Journal, which later became the basis for a series of reports titled “Facebook Files.” Some of these documents indicated that the company was aware of the negative impact its platform had on the mental health of teenagers.
A new film directed by Aaron Sorkin, " The Social Reckoning ", will be released on October 9th, and the story of the film revolves around this event. Hogan also wrote a book about his experience of exposing these documents, titled " The Power of One : How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook ".
As the debate over the threat posed by AI to humanity has intensified in recent weeks, Haugen stated that AI is now "more proactive and aggressive" in addressing security concerns than in previous years. She also mentioned that Anthropic and its CEO, Dario Amodei, have pushed for the introduction of independent auditors.
“I think this shows that, at least Dario knows, if you give people the room to take shortcuts, even the kindest among us will start to do so,” said Haugen.
