Senate Majority Leader

Chuck Charles E.

Schumer has been talking for months about accomplishing a potentially impossible task: passing bipartisan legislation within a year that would encourage the rapid development of artificial intelligence and reduce its greatest risks.

On Wednesday, he convened a meeting with some of the country’s most prominent technology executives to ask them how Congress should do that.

The closed forum on Capitol Hill included nearly two dozen tech executives, tech advocates, as well as skeptics, including civil rights groups and labor leaders. The guest list included some of the biggest names in the industry: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and X and Tesla’s Elon Musk, as well as former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. All one hundred senators were invited; the public does not.

Schumer (D-N.Y.) opened the session by saying that “today we begin a massive, complex and critical undertaking: building a foundation for a bipartisan AI policy that can be passed by Congress.

Schumer, who co-chaired the forum with Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), won’t necessarily follow the tech executives’ advice as he works with colleagues to try to ensure some oversight of the fast-growing sector. But he hopes they will give senators some realistic direction as he tries to do what Congress has been unable to do for years: enact meaningful regulation of the tech industry.

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It will be a fascinating group because they have different points of view, Schumer said in an interview with the Associated Press before the event. Hopefully we can turn it into somewhat of a broad consensus.

Rounds, who joined Schumer in the interview, said Congress must get ahead of the rapidly evolving AI by ensuring it continues to evolve positively while addressing potential issues around data transparency and privacy.

AI isn’t going away, and it can do really good things or it can be a real challenge, Rounds said.

Some concrete proposals are already being introduced, including a bill that would require disclaimers for AI-generated election ads with misleading images and sounds. A broader approach would create a government oversight authority with the power to check certain AI systems for harm before licensing them.

Schumer said that regulating artificial intelligence will be one of the biggest problems we can ever tackle, and ticked off the reasons why: It’s technically complex, it’s difficult to change, and it has such a broad, broad effect across the board. world, he said. .

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Congress has a mediocre record when it comes to regulating technology. Lawmakers have many proposals, but have mostly failed to agree on major legislation to regulate the sector. Powerful tech companies have resisted, and some lawmakers are wary of over-regulation.

Many lawmakers point to the lack of any legislation surrounding social media. Bills have remained pending in the House of Representatives and the Senate that would, for example, better protect children, regulate election activities and impose stricter privacy standards.

We don’t want to do what we did with social media, which is let the techies figure it out and fix it later, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark.

R.

Warner (D-Va.) said of the AI ​​push.

Schumer’s bipartisan Rounds and Sens working group. Martin Heinrich (DN.M.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.) hope the rapid growth of artificial intelligence will create more urgency.

Fueled by the release of ChatGPT less than a year ago, companies across many industries have been pushing to adopt new generative AI tools that can compose

humanoid

text passages, program computer code, and create new images, audio, and video. The hype over such tools has increased concerns about their potential societal harm and led to calls for more transparency about how the data behind the new products is used.

is

a

regarding

collected and used.

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You have to have some government involvement in the guardrails, Schumer said. If there are no guardrails, who knows what could happen.

While many members of Congress agree that legislation may be necessary in response to the rapid escalation of artificial intelligence, there is little consensus on what that should be, or what might be necessary. There is also division, with some members of Congress more concerned about overregulation, while others more concerned about the potential risks of an uncontrolled industry. Those differences often fall along party lines.

“I am deeply involved in this process to ensure that we act, but we do not act more boldly or broadly than the circumstances require,” Young said. We have to be skeptical of government, and that’s why I think it’s important to get Republicans to the table.

Schumer said the focus of the forum is

big wide

ideas such as whether the government should be involved at all and what questions Congress should ask.

Participants were given three minutes to speak on a topic of their choice, with Schumer and Rounds moderating open discussions within the group.

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Some of Schumer’s most influential guests, including Musk and Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, have raised serious concerns that are raising popular science fiction about the possibility of humanity losing control to advanced AI systems if the right safeguards aren’t in place are.

But for many lawmakers and the people they represent, the effects of AI on employment and…

navigate

a stream of AI-generated disinformation is more direct

worry about consequences

. A recent report from market research group Forrester predicted that generative AI technology could replace 2.4 million jobs in the US by 2030, many of which will be white-collar jobs unaffected by previous waves of automation.

AI experts have also warned of the growing potential of AI-generated online disinformation to influence elections, including the

expectant

2024 presidential race.

Rounds said he would like to see the empowerment of new medical technologies that can save lives and give medical professionals access to more data. That subject is very personal to me,

said

Rounds,

whose

woman died of cancer two years ago.

Some Republicans are wary of following the path of the European Union, which signed the world’s first set of comprehensive artificial intelligence rules in June. The EU AI law will apply to any product or service that uses an AI system and classify it according to four levels of risk, from minimal to unacceptable.

A group of companies have called on EU leaders to reconsider the rules, arguing this could make it harder for companies in the 27-nation bloc to compete with rivals abroad in the use of generative AI.

In the United States, most major tech companies have expressed support for AI regulation, though they don’t necessarily agree on what that means.

We’ve always said we believe AI should be regulated, said Dana Rao, general counsel and chief trust officer of software company Adobe. We’ve been talking to Europe about this for the last four years, helping them think through the AI ​​law they’re about to pass. There are high-risk use cases for AI that we believe government must play a role in ensuring are safe for the public and consumers.

Adobe, which makes Photoshop and the new AI image generator Firefly, is proposing its own federal legislation: an anti-imitation law to protect both artists and AI developers from misusing generative AI tools to produce derivative works without the creator’s consent .

Senators say they will find a way to regulate the industry despite all odds.

Make no mistake. There will be regulations. The only question is how fast and what, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who has been working on his own AI bill.

___O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island. Associated Press writers Ali Swenson in New York and Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this report.