Our View: Congress must step up to regulate AI

Artificial intelligence seems to be the high-fructose corn syrup and Red Dye No. 3 of today’s technology.

Companies are in such a rush to develop the newest shiny thing involving AI that they seem to ignore increasing moral and practical warnings of potential downsides of the technologies.

Instead of worrying about the negative effects of AI on children and humankind, tech bros are obsessed about being first in line to cash in.

AI is moving at such a frightening pace that regular people are smart to be worried. It’s also time for people to insist that the government step away from its laissez-faire treatment of the industry. Federal and state lawmakers should regulate it, slow down its development and make sure applications are for the common good, not something that can metastasize into an untamed digital beast to make humans unnecessary.

Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lapore was in town recently hawking her new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.” And what she has concluded about artificial intelligence is scary as hell — if it is left to flourish without proper oversight. Already, she told a crowd at the Gaillard Center, there are more bots in cyberspace than humans on earth.

She essentially said tech companies today have turned the promise of the Internet to democratize society with buckets of information so citizens can be better informed into little more than daily online popularity contests fed by influencers and bots to generate clicks for money. “I don’t think that I should ask Claude to name my new puppy,” Lapore suggested.

People today are rightly worried about data centers fueling more AI to extract our humanity, she said. What needs to happen, she stressed, was that the country needs new guardrails on AI technologies and applications — just like it created moral frameworks in global society for chemical weapons after World War I and for nuclear weapons after World War II. Now, there need to be clear lines in the sand drawn to keep the good opportunities for AI available, but to ward off nefarious uses that will harm humans.

Congress has been mostly on the sidelines about ways to control AI, but conversations are starting to happen now that people are waking up on environmental, social and other threats posed by the explosion of planned data centers.

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat in town recently to talk about his book, Crisis of the Common Good, pushed four big ideas in a call to action on ways “to protect our spiritual health from poisonous technology:

Restrict children’s use of social media and artificial intelligence products like friendship bots. A vast majority of Americans want safeguards for kids, he wrote.
Hold social media companies liable for harms they knowingly impose on users. The first step: Update the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
Regulate AI-generated video and audio content — and make AI companies pay for content their models train on.
Put fees on data center construction so AI companies pay true, full costs of processing AI data.

The midterm elections are just around the corner. Let’s make sure the next Congress focuses on AI regulation, not more partisanship.