Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is pouring millions of dollars into combating AI's dark side

Craig Newmark made his fortune off an internet site, based in 1995, that served as an early on-line bulletin board and appears prefer it hasn’t been up to date in twenty years.

That web site, Craigslist, continues to be cranking alongside, that includes house listings, an lively jobs board and gadgets on the market. But the privately held firm has lengthy been surpassed in worth by the likes of Airbnb, LinkedIn and Facebook Marketplace, which all face Wall Street’s calls for for progress and revenue.

Though Newmark’s web firm could also be outdated, his issues about the place the trade is headed are most definitely not. Since the 2015 debut of Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the entrepreneur has donated many hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to numerous causes involving media and expertise.

Most just lately, his group contributed $3 million to assist fund a brand new synthetic intelligence and training initiative from Common Sense Media, the nonprofit instructed CNBC this week.

“While I tried to pay some attention to what was going on, just everything caught me by surprise,” Newmark mentioned, referring to the present growth of generative AI and all the brand new and clever chatbots.

Newmark, 70, spoke to CNBC as he was recovering from a minor coronary heart process he went by means of in late August. The coronary heart ablation required Newmark to put on his again “the whole time in the wrong position” and he “woke up with a lot of back pain,” he mentioned.

More than the surgical procedure, Newmark wished to speak in regards to the hospital meals.

“Hospital pudding is really good,” he mentioned. “And since they served my lunch cold, I asked them and got more containers of pudding.”

Newmark, who ran his enterprise out of San Francisco however now lives along with his spouse in New York, mentioned the hospital keep did not trigger him to mirror a lot on mortality, as he’d already addressed such existential points when he determined to simplify his life by making a gift of a lot of his Craigslist riches.

Newmark’s basis has principally targeted on donating to organizations and causes pertaining to journalism, combating misinformation, countering on-line harassment, cybersecurity points, and supporting veterans and army households.

The fast evolution of AI and its potential hazards have just lately caught Newmark’s consideration, and his cash.

The purpose of Common Sense’s AI undertaking is to supply an AI scores system for folks, educators, policymakers and regulators to allow them to consider what makes sure instruments like OpenAI’s ChatGPT secure or unsafe for youngsters. Additionally, the nonprofit is providing on-line AI literacy programs meant to assist mother and father and educators train fundamental AI fundamentals to youngsters.

The full scope of AI’s capabilities and potential for societal hurt turned extra clear to Newmark by the point corporations started “modifying search engines to use generative AI.”

“I realized that if a search engine was using sources that weren’t reliable, if the sources were about lying to people, that would create a big, ethical problem, and you really don’t want a news source of any sort to knowingly lie,” Newmark mentioned.

Newmark is anxious that dangerous actors will use generative AI to extra simply amplify and unfold disinformation. At the identical time, he is frightened that tech corporations, significantly in social media, “aren’t even trying anymore to get rid of stuff they know is dishonest,” he mentioned.

Tech corporations like Meta, Amazon and X (previously often called Twitter) just lately laid off quite a few belief and security staff as a part of main cost-cutting initiatives, however have mentioned that the downsizing will not have an effect on the protection of their platforms.

Meanwhile, AI has the potential to profoundly have an effect on society, just like the web and the printing press earlier than it, Newmark mentioned. That’s an space the place he has notable experience. Craigslist was each massively disruptive to newspapers and their labeled advertisements sections, and has been a web site that is attracted criminals and scammers.

Few individuals predicted the “bad uses” of the web, which has allowed nefarious actors to “mostly lie to people in large numbers,” Newmark mentioned.

“I guess the profits to be made in being a really good professional liar, those profits have greatly increased because the internet is a big amplifier,” Newmark mentioned. “It’s everyone’s printing press, and you get to use it as a printing press, whether your intentions are good or bad.”

Newmark mentioned he turned all in favour of language-generating software program like ChatGPT within the early Nineteen Seventies, “when people were beginning to talk about language understanding and neural networks.” However, he says, “I didn’t really understand it.”

Now the expertise is right here and spreading quickly.

Newmark mentioned he does not wish to title names in terms of the organizations he fears are creating essentially the most societal discontent by means of AI, as a result of he is beforehand been scarred for getting that particular.

“In the past when I’ve pointed out major problems, I’ve learned the hard way that I’m no match for someone who lies for a living,” Newmark mentioned. “So, I’m allowing myself to be chickens—.”

Rather, he mentioned he depends on “people who are both braver and smarter” to name public consideration to these issues.

“Protecting kids when it comes to AI is a big issue,” Newmark mentioned, concerning his donation to Common Sense Media. “I have no idea how I would go about getting started, but I know where to put my money where my mouth is.”

Why Common Sense?

“A lot of groups and politicians talk about protecting kids,” Newmark mentioned. “But these guys are the real deal, and so I’m helping them.”

Newmark acknowledged that the subjects of misinformation, journalism and content material moderation have turn into extra polarized and politicized of late. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, alleged that tech corporations unfairly censor conservative speech, and he is undertaken a “censorship investigation” to probe suspected ties between the manager department and sure technologists and researchers.

Several lecturers beforehand instructed CNBC that the politicized panorama has led to some organizations chopping again on funding analysis into combating misinformation for concern of being publicly criticized.  

“Some people are backing off, some people are getting braver. Again, I’m not very brave,” Newmark mentioned. He highlighted the Knight Foundation and Ford Foundation as organizations which might be “doing brave things.”

Within journalism, Newmark’s most high-profile endeavor is the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School in Journalism. The program was renamed in 2018 after Newmark endowed the college with a $20 million present, although he made prior contributions in 2016 and 2017.

He additionally donated $20 million in 2018 to assist fund The Markup, which describes itself as a “nonprofit newsroom that investigates how powerful institutions are using technology to change our society.” That undertaking rapidly turned controversial after founding editor-in-chief Julia Angwin mentioned she’d been fired over electronic mail by co-founder and government director Sue Gardner.

Still, Newmark says each the CUNY journalism college and The Markup have been profitable, whereas different efforts “have not been successful, and I’m being discreet about them because I’m still trying to help before I have much sterner talks.”

He pegs his philanthropy success charge at “70 or 80%, which is good, but it’s not 100.”

In phrases of the place he spends his time on-line, Newmark mentioned he nonetheless posts on X, primarily to advertise and spotlight the work of academics. However, he mentioned the location is dropping its effectiveness because it leans in direction of displaying individuals algorithmically really useful posts.

“As a social network, Twitter does seem to be gone,” Newmark mentioned, including that he is making an attempt out rivals like Bluesky, Mastodon and Meta’s Threads.

In explicit, Newmark mentioned he likes “like the spirit of Mastodon and Bluesky,” which he likened to the early days of the web when it took a very long time for web sites to construct devoted audiences.

“The audience development is very slow,” Newmark mentioned. “Twitter and everything else grew slowly and the other sites are growing slowly, and yet we are impatient and we want to see network effects now.”

Cybersecurity is one other space of focus for Newmark. He pointed to a current $100 million dedication introduced in March to a set of organizations engaged on cyber-related points, like combating the unfold of ransomware and creating strategies for tech and safety corporations to share risk info.

He mentioned the entire quantity will in all probability exceed $100 million, as a result of he is already “broken through $80 million.”

In June, Newmark’s philanthropy arm additionally pledged to donate $100 million to a number of organizations supporting veterans and army members, who “sometimes have to choose between decent housing or feeding their families,” Newmark mentioned. He referred to as the remedy of that neighborhood “a national security matter.”

“There’s nothing virtuous in that,” Newmark mentioned about his donations, noting that he does not spend his cash on “yachts or fast cars.”

“It’s more satisfying to give it away,” Newmark mentioned. “Again, that’s not pious or altruistic. It’s just what I was taught in Sunday school.”

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