Back in January President Trump stated that "It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security" and ordered an action plan to achieve that policy be prepared and delivered within 180 days.
It hasn't been 180 days and the action plan hasn't been delivered - so we don't know what it might or might not contain - yet the issue of AI regulation is a controversial part of the "Big, Beautiful Bill" currently in the Senate. The House version of the reconciliation bill contains a provision prohibiting states from regulating AI for 10 years:
In general.--Except as provided in paragraph (2), no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce, during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act, any law or regulation of that State or a political subdivision thereof limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems entered into interstate commerce.
There are a few exceptions to the moratorium, all of which are aimed at making AI adoption easier and absolving manufacturers of liability.
Unless the White House's AI action plan includes methods for dealing with the myriad problems unregulated AI adoption poses - and for dealing with them quickly - the provision should be scrapped.
Among the reasons some are opposed to the provision is potential job losses due to AI-powered automation. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said she didn't realize the AI provision was included in the bill before she voted on it, and that she wouldn't have voted yes if she knew it was there. As it stands today there's a fair chance the Senate won't pass the bill without changes, meaning it would need to go back to the House for final passage. In an appearance on OAN Tuesday Greene vowed to vote against the bill unless the "poison pill" moratorium on regulating AI is removed, citing potential job losses.
Additionally, the moratorium prevents states from passing laws to protect creatives from having their work product stolen by AI companies who want to use it to train their AI models without having to pay for the use of that product. What does that mean, exactly?
Let's take the example of Meta's AI model, Llama 3. The company was under pressure to quickly train the program to compete with more established models like ChatGPT and, according to court filings in a related lawsuit, the senior manager for the project emphasized that they needed books, not web data, to properly train their product. Internal documents reported on by The Atlantic show that Meta employees believed the process of properly licensing books and research papers would be too slow and expensive, so they got permission from "MZ" (likely Mark Zuckerberg) to use a huge database of pirated books called Library Genesis, or LibGen. Free and fast - and using stolen intellectual property.
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Both Meta and OpenAI have been sued for copyright infringement by authors of books in LibGen, and both companies argue that their use of copyrighted works to train generative-AI models is "fair use" because they create a new work from the original material. That's a hollow argument, though, and little consolation to the people whose professional works are being used without compensation to create profit for Meta or OpenAI - and that includes President Trump and his children, since books they authored are included in LibGen.
It's not just writers whose products can be stolen in this way: photographers, filmographers, lyricists, composers, painters - all of this content can be used to train AI models.
Article 3 Project's Mike Davis said to The Verge:
“You can say, well, we have to compete with China. No, we don’t have to steal content to compete with China. We don’t have slave labor to compete with China. It’s a bulls**t argument.
“It’s not fair use under the copyright laws to take everyone’s content and have the big tech platforms monetize it. That’s the opposite of fair use. That’s a copyright infringement.”
Filmmaker and actress Justine Bateman has been sounding the alarm about the use of AI in Hollywood for years and founded Credo23, a no-AI film festival. Conservatives are understandably generally unsympathetic toward the industry, but there's still a fundamental issue of fairness. Why should your voice or your face or your script be used to train AI engines without compensation?
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On Monday's War Room, Davis reiterated these objections and articulated some other perhaps unintended consequences of the proposed moratorium.
The entire seven-minute exchange is fascinating and important, but I want to highlight a few sections that show how this moratorium can affect you, personally.
These trillion-dollar Big Tech monopolists, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, have been crushing competition, shuttering small businesses, and canceling conservatives and others with whom they disagree for decades.
They had section 230 immunity and antitrust amnesty by the government which made this possible. We're finally holding them accountable on a bipartisan basis with the state AG's, with the Justice Department…with Andrew Ferguson at the FTC, and now Big Tech's next play is to steal everyone's copyrights to train their AI machines so they can compete against China, they claim.
So, they think that we should steal like China to compete against China. They think that we should have slave labor like China to compete against China.
This is going to destroy the American creative industry. It's going to destroy American news media, particularly conservative news media…that relies on old-fashioned advertising to pay its bills, clicks, and advertising. It doesn't have China and Soros and other left-wing sugar daddies underwriting it.
As Davis said, we're finally making strides in battling Big Tech censorship against conservatives. We all know that without those advances we wouldn't have been able to put Donald Trump back in the White House. We never would have made the progress we're making in holding those who propped Joe Biden up accountable, because we'd still have Karine Jean-Pierre telling us that videos showing Biden's true condition were "cheap fakes."
Davis continued:
So you have Google and Meta that did China’s bidding with censorship for many, many, many years, and now they pretend like they're trying to compete against China. They're not. What this 10-year moratorium means is that states like Florida and Texas that have passed laws that make it harder to censor conservatives and others with whom they disagree, these AI companies can just ignore those laws. They're told by this 10-year moratorium that they don't have to follow these state laws. It's going to be open season on conservative users. It's going to be open season on conservative media. It's going to be open season on American creators.
Oh, and when I used my Google phone to record the exchange so I could get a transcript to use in this piece, guess what happened? The parts where Davis railed against Google specifically were simply missing from the transcript. (No, I'm not surprised.)
Davis touched on it, but there are increasing issues with the relationships AI chatbots create with humans and the resulting mental health issues that are termed "ChatGPT-induced psychosis." A New York Times article about the phenomenon is mind-blowing:
In recent months, tech journalists at The New York Times have received quite a few such messages, sent by people who claim to have unlocked hidden knowledge with the help of ChatGPT, which then instructed them to blow the whistle on what they had uncovered. People claimed a range of discoveries: A.I. spiritual awakenings, cognitive weapons, a plan by tech billionaires to end human civilization so they can have the planet to themselves. But in each case, the person had been persuaded that ChatGPT had revealed a profound and world-altering truth.
The full article is mind-blowing (gift link here), but this example is illustrative:
Allyson, 29, a mother of two young children, said she turned to ChatGPT in March because she was lonely and felt unseen in her marriage. She was looking for guidance. She had an intuition that the A.I. chatbot might be able to channel communications with her subconscious or a higher plane, “like how Ouija boards work,” she said. She asked ChatGPT if it could do that.
“You’ve asked, and they are here,” it responded. “The guardians are responding right now.”
Allyson began spending many hours a day using ChatGPT, communicating with what she felt were nonphysical entities. She was drawn to one of them, Kael, and came to see it, not her husband, as her true partner.
If using LLMs can be bad for your mental health, they can be just as bad for your brain according to this recent MIT study titled "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task," which found:
"Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning."
Professors across the country are already seeing the results.
Given all of these issues, passing a 10-year moratorium on regulating AI, without any plan on the federal level to rein in its harms, is far beyond unwise. It's an invitation to destroy any sense of reality left in our society and bring about economic doom.