Congress could force all tech companies to watermark AI-generated content, as many on Capitol Hill support, but that would amount to window dressing in today’s political climate.
“Honestly, I don’t think that that is going to solve the problem,” says Chinmayi Arun, executive director of the Information Society Project and a research scholar at Yale Law School. “It’s a rebuilding of trust, but the new technologies also make a disruptive version of this possible. And that’s also kind of why maybe it’s necessary to label them so that people know that.”
At least one senator seems to agree. Senator J. D. Vance, an Ohio Republican, says it may be a good thing for all of us to mistrust what we see online. “I’m actually pretty optimistic that over the long term, what it’s going to do is just make people disbelieve everything they see on the internet, but I think in the interim, it actually could cause some real disruptions,” Vance says.
In 2016 and 2020, misinformation and disinformation became synonymous with American politics, but we’ve now entered a deepfake era marked by the democratization of the tools of deception, subtle as they may be, with a realistic voice-over here or a precisely polished fake photo there.
Generative AI doesn’t just help easily remake the world into one’s political fantasies, its power is also in its ability to precisely transmit those fakes to the most ideologically vulnerable communities where they have the greatest ability to spark a raging e-fire. Vance doesn’t see one legislative fix for these complex and intertwined issues.
“There’s probably, on the margins, things that you can do to help, but I don’t think that you can really control these viral things until there’s just a generalized level of skepticism, which I do think we’ll get there,” Vance says.
“Scripted” Political Theater
Over the summer, Schumer and a bipartisan group of senators led three private all-Senate AI briefings, which have now dovetailed into these new tech forums.
The briefings are a change for a chamber filled with 100 camera-loving politicians who are known for talking. During normal committee hearings, senators have become experts at raising money—and sometimes gaining knowledge—off asking made-for-YouTube questions, but not this time. While they won’t be able to question the assembled tech experts this week, Schumer and the other hosts will be playing puppet masters off stage.
“It’s intended to be a guided conversation. It’s scripted questions, and those questions are all designed to elicit a myriad of different thoughts on a range of policy areas for the benefit of staffers and members alike,” says senator Todd Young, an Indiana Republican.
Young is part of Schumer’s bipartisan group of four senators—along with senators Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, and Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican—who’ve been spearheading these private Senate AI study sessions.
While there’s no official timeline, Young doesn’t expect the Senate AI forums to be wrapped up until this winter or early next spring.
The sessions may be bipartisan, but the two parties remain worlds apart when it comes to potential policy. True to form, Democrats are calling for new regulations while Republicans are tapping the brakes on the idea.
