Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) unveiled his SAFE Innovation Framework, a set of policy objectives for an “all-hands-on-deck effort” to contend with artificial intelligence (AI). He called this a “moment of revolution” that will lead to “profound, and dramatic change,” and invoked experts who “predict that in just a few years the world could be wholly unrecognizable from the one we live in today.”
With all the hype following the release of generative AI systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, it’s no surprise that U.S. policymakers are keen to generate shiny new legislative proposals. To his credit, Sen. Schumer is calling for a serious, systematic approach to set priorities and develop legislation that preserves what he calls “our north star – innovation.” But while the “Insight Forums” he proposes to convene this fall will no doubt be interesting, the reality is that most of what Congress needs to do is fairly basic – and it can take these steps today...
There are dozens of other existing proposals relevant to AI. Anna Lenhart, a Knight Policy Fellow at the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics at the George Washington University, recently collected a list of federal legislative proposals that would “govern the processing of data, including the generative AI tools currently capturing the nation’s imagination,” and address other concerns such as market power, discrimination, and the proliferation of harmful content. Legislation related to AI may see more bipartisan compromise compared to when the focus was solely on social media. But few of these proposals made any progress in the last Congress, and Sen. Schumer’s initiative is set to kick off against the inhospitable calendar of a presidential election year.
Read the full article in Tech Policy Press.