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Senators are concentrating on artificial intelligence risks to the 2024 election cycle as a priority for legislation to address dangers from the emerging technology.
Sen. Todd Young, Indiana Republican, said Tuesday that lawmakers agree Congress must act on AI despite the approaching elections.
Mr. Young is working with Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, to develop new AI law and singled out next year’s elections as a major concern, in remarks at the Fortune CEO Initiative in Washington.
“As I speak to most members of the United States Senate, they embrace the idea that there are some fairly obvious, rifle-shot legislative initiatives that we’re just going to have to tackle regardless of what sort of political dynamics might intervene as we head into next year,” Mr. Young said. “I think one of those is clearly elections.”
Mr. Young said many of the fears surrounding burgeoning AI tools will not require new laws but application of existing laws, though not all of his colleagues agree.
Mr. Schumer is seeking to craft a comprehensive AI bill and has started talking with his House Republican counterparts as he formulates such a legislative package.
Some lawmakers are pessimistic about the chances of a large AI bill passing Congress anytime soon.
“I don’t think we will do holistic AI regulation short-term,” said Sen. Mark Warner at the Fortune event on Tuesday.
The Virginia Democrat singled out elections and public markets as the two domains where lawmakers must impose guardrails. He said elections and markets are the two realms perhaps most likely to get disrupted by new AI tools.
Election-focused AI legislation appears likely to come from the Senate Rules Committee, which is studying the new tech’s potential effects on elections.
The rules committee held a hearing reviewing the impact on elections last week, during which Mr. Schumer said Congress must act to stop AI from upending elections.
“If we don’t act, we could soon live in a world where political campaigns regularly deploy totally fabricated but also totally believable images and footage of Democratic or Republican candidates, distorting their statements and greatly harming their election chances,” Mr. Schumer said at the hearing. “And what then is to stop foreign adversaries from taking advantage of this technology to interfere with our elections?”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota Democrat, leads the rules committee and will have a major say in any AI-focused legislation on elections moving through Congress. She received praise from Mr. Young on her attention to AI’s ramifications for elections in the Indiana senator’s remarks on Tuesday.
Ms. Klobuchar and Mr. Schumer are not always aligned on tech-themed legislation.
After Mr. Schumer declined to bring her preferred antitrust legislation aimed at Big Tech up for a Senate floor vote last year, Ms. Klobuchar reprimanded Congress generally in remarks at a Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee hearing in March.
Ms. Klobuchar said Congress had accomplished nothing on tech legislation and lamented Big Tech lobbyists.
“Nothing out of the Congress on privacy, nothing out of the Congress on updating the children’s protection bills when it comes to the internet, nothing on the Congress when it comes to dominance on the platforms and self-preferencing, nothing out of the Congress on AI,” Ms. Klobuchar said in March. “You can come to your own conclusions on why that has happened.”
Ms. Klobuchar and Mr. Schumer thanked each other for their work and leadership on AI policy in remarks at the Senate Rules Committee hearing last week.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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