With the 2024 elections right around the corner, senators warned about issues arising from the use of unregulated AI technology, and said they will aim to approve legislation creating AI “guardrails” on election security by the end of this year.
During a U.S. Senate Committee on Rules and Administration hearing on Sept. 27, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., emphasized her hope of getting legislation approved that can help protect election integrity.
“Given the stakes for our democracy, we cannot afford to wait,” the senator said. “So the hope is we can move on some of this by year-end with some of the legislation which already has bipartisan support, to be able to get it done with some larger legislation.”
The hearing underscored a recent bipartisan push from Sens. Klobuchar, Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Chris Coons, D-Del., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, to address problems that AI poses as well as create remedies to prevent the use of AI to hurt election processes.
“Senator Hawley and I worked over the last two months on a bill together that we are leading together … to get at deep fake videos,” said Sen. Klobuchar.
One of the main issues that both lawmakers and experts on the issue of AI and elections have been running into is being able to agree on a definition of AI technology.
During this week’s hearing, Neil Chilson, senior research fellow for the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, discussed this dilemma and said it was difficult because of shifting definitions of the technology.
“If you run through the list of things that have been considered AI in the past, and which nobody really calls AI now, you [will] have everything from edge detection, which is in everybody’s cameras, to letter detection, to playing chess, to playing checkers – things that once it works, we kind of stopped calling it AI,” said Chilson.
“That’s the classic phrase by the person who actually coined the term AI and so there is not an agreed upon legal definition,” he said.
Other issues brought forth during the hearing include the already growing integration of AI technology in many technologies used on a daily basis by Americans.
“AI powered facial and eye detection ensures that subjects remain in focus. Apple’s newly announced iPhone 15 takes this to the next level,” said Chilson. “It’s dedicated neural nets powering its computational photography. With those it’s no exaggeration to say that every photo taken on an iPhone 15 will be generated in part by AI.”
