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AI Government

In America, A Complex Patchwork of State AI Regulations Has Already Arrived (cio.com) 13

While the European Parliament passed a wide-ranging "AI Act" in March, "Leaders from Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI have all called for AI regulations in the U.S.," writes CIO magazine. Even the Chamber of Commerce, "often opposed to business regulation, has called on Congress to protect human rights and national security as AI use expands," according to the article, while the White House has released a blueprint for an AI bill of rights.

But even though the U.S. Congress hasn't passed AI legislation — 16 different U.S. states have, "and state legislatures have already introduced more than 400 AI bills across the U.S. this year, six times the number introduced in 2023." Many of the bills are targeted both at the developers of AI technologies and the organizations putting AI tools to use, says Goli Mahdavi, a lawyer with global law firm BCLP, which has established an AI working group. And with populous states such as California, New York, Texas, and Florida either passing or considering AI legislation, companies doing business across the US won't be able to avoid the regulations. Enterprises developing and using AI should be ready to answer questions about how their AI tools work, even when deploying automated tools as simple as spam filtering, Mahdavi says. "Those questions will come from consumers, and they will come from regulators," she adds. "There's obviously going to be heightened scrutiny here across the board."
There's sector-specific bills, and bills that demand transparency (of both development and output), according to the article. "The third category of AI bills covers broad AI bills, often focused on transparency, preventing bias, requiring impact assessment, providing for consumer opt-outs, and other issues."

One example the article notes is Senate Bill 1047, introduced in the California State Legislature in February, "would require safety testing of AI products before they're released, and would require AI developers to prevent others from creating derivative models of their products that are used to cause critical harms."

Adrienne Fischer, a lawyer with Basecamp Legal, a Denver law firm monitoring state AI bills, tells CIO that many of the bills promote best practices in privacy and data security, but said the fragmented regulatory environment "underscores the call for national standards or laws to provide a coherent framework for AI usage."

Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the article.
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In America, A Complex Patchwork of State AI Regulations Has Already Arrived

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  • The governments around the world who have AI regulation have just figured out how to spell "AI".

  • We're totally going to win a war on AI. Once We take down all the violent programming, We must go after witchcraft, or people will be able still use words to shape their lives mysteriously.
  • Two motivations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Sunday April 07, 2024 @10:45AM (#64376528) Homepage
    With such a new technology, there are only two motivations at work: Clueless politicians wanting to be seen "doing" something, and the big corps guiding them, in order to put hurdles in front of any potential competition. Regulatory capture at its best.
    • The problem is like Quantum Computing's discussion. There's a fear in the legislatures that you might be able to get a computer better than the governments... therefore they would be able to predict a criminal's next move. But, "quantum" means "only able to solve one thing" so there's no Windows/Linux or SQL Server/MySQL/Oracle possible. Therefore, the discussion ended with no-work researchers claiming such things were coming killed and their funding rerouted.

      So, here we go again over AI... almost all new p

    • The good thing about it is there is no way to stop it short of forbidding people to own sufficiently powerful computers. No amount of regulation can stop someone from tinkering on his own.
  • In Washington State, no AI is permitted that is smarter than the state legislature.

    That should keep it down in the realm of a simple bash script.

  • Noticed that several states in the listed article have model data privacy laws off of California's law.

    1) Companies must have a statement of privacy
    2) Said statement of privacy will have a clear way to 1) Request the data they have on you, 2) Request that they delete the data and never share/sell it

    Unfortunately, there is no general legal recourse for private citizens to sue the data brokers, only the state attorney general can do that. And we know where that goes....
    State attorney general sues a large com

  • require AI developers to prevent others from creating derivative models of their products

    This is the "saying the quiet part out loud" of AI legislation. This means no more open source AI models period. You can't guarantee what someone else will do if you provide them the means to recreate your AI.

    What a braindead proposition. "Hey, instead of actually cracking down on the developers of AI who do evil we'll crack down on the developers of AI who gave them the ideas that let them do something evil!"

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