Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. – long a champion of tech and cyber bills on Capitol Hill – in the last few months has teamed up with a bipartisan group of lawmakers to generate momentum for several pieces of AI legislation in the Senate that she sees gaining serious legislative traction early next year.
The senator said during Axios’ AI+ Summit on Tuesday that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s, D-N.Y., AI insight forums have “blossomed a lot of ideas.”
The AI insight forums have “given us these months of having these bipartisan meetings [and] from there has blossomed a lot of ideas and bills have been introduced,” Sen. Klobuchar said. “I think that is the best way to do it.”
Sen. Schumer announced the AI insight forums earlier this summer, noting that he will begin inviting “the best of the best” to convene in one room to do “years of work in just months.”
The meetings happen behind closed doors and are not like traditional committee hearings. They have been co-led by Sens. Schumer, Todd Young, R-Ind., Martin Heinrich, D-N.M. and Mike Rounds, R-S.D. Other senators and their staff are encouraged to attend but are not allowed to ask questions.
The first bipartisan AI forum was held on Sept. 13 and hosted a gaggle of big tech CEOs, including X’s Elon Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. The five AI forums that followed on Capitol Hill involved conversations with experts around topics including innovation, workforce, high-impact AI, elections, and privacy.
Today, Sen. Schumer will host the seventh AI forum on copyright and intellectual property.
Sen. Klobuchar said of the AI forums during the Axios event on Nov. 28 that the Senate is “finishing up in the next week,” with a discussion on AI in the defense realm to follow today’s copyright focus.
She explained that from there, all of the different AI bills that have been introduced will be “gathered together in a package” and “the plan would be to work on them early in the year.”
“We’re obviously not going to do them in the next three weeks,” the senator said.
“There may be some bills going off on their own just because we decide, boy, we have to get these done now,” Sen. Klobuchar added.
Specifically, the senator pointed to her own efforts around AI in elections: “If there’s one thing we better get done soon, I think it’s that.”
The Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act would ban the use of AI to generate deceptive content to influence Federal elections. Sen. Klobuchar introduced the legislation on Sept. 12 alongside Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Chris Coons, D-Del., and Susan Collins, R-Maine.
The bill aims to identify and ban “deep fakes” – which use a form of AI called deep learning to create images or videos of fake events – depicting Federal candidates in political ads. Sen. Klobuchar said the bill would work hand in hand with a watermarking tool that can label whether images have been generated with AI.
More recently, the senator unveiled a “light touch” AI bill with Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., that focuses on self-certification with risk-based guardrails compared to licensing.
The AI Research, Innovation, and Accountability Act of 2023 aims to provide clear distinctions on AI-generated content and other identification for AI systems, including those deemed “high impact” and “critical impact.” The bill would require companies deploying critical-impact AI to perform detailed risk assessments. Deployers of “high impact” AI systems would be required to submit transparency reports to the Commerce Department.
Sen. Klobuchar also pointed to a discussion draft of legislation that she surfaced in October alongside Sen. Coons and Sens. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., to protect the voice and visual likenesses of individuals from unfair use through generative AI.
The Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act would prevent a person from producing or distributing an unauthorized AI-generated replica of an individual to perform in an audiovisual or sound recording without the consent of the individual being replicated.
“The [bill] on the intellectual property and on people’s rights to their own images, that is going to be very important too,” Sen. Klobuchar said during the Axios AI+ Summit. “We have a discussion draft out on that as well for people to give their comments.”
“Time is of the essence, but we also don’t want to screw it up,” Klobuchar concluded. “I think the lesson that we learned from doing nothing on tech, and just pretending it’s still some few companies in a garage, that just has not paid off well in the end. There’s a lot of problems coming out of that. And so, I just want to handle [AI] much differently.”
