All across the country, state legislatures — in sharp contrast to Congress — are scrambling to pass laws that try to limit the harms of artificial intelligence technology.

Why?

• Because Big Tech is locked in a myopic AI arms race, rushing out ever more powerful systems with no apparent regard for the negative impacts on consumers, workers, and our society at large.

• Artificial intelligence technology has gotten so powerful that it is becoming increasingly difficult to know whether what you’re reading, hearing, or seeing is real or not.

• AI systems are already threatening our democracy, supercharging the spread of nonconsensual intimate images, fostering discrimination in housing and job interviews, and threatening the future of the Internet.

After ChatGPT made its first big public splash, members of Congress agreed on the need to regulate this rapidly evolving technology. But then Big Tech deployed its lobbyists, flexed its political muscle, cozied up to Donald Trump, and spread the lie that regulating AI would undermine U.S. economic competitiveness — and Congress lost interest in addressing AI harms.

Instead, Republicans in Congress are fighting over just how many Americans should lose health care and go hungry to fund even more tax breaks for billionaires and Big Business.

In league with Big Tech, Senator Ted Cruz (Texas) is trying to sneak language into the “reconciliation” bill that would nullify all state and local safeguards on AI for a decade. A decade — when the tech bro’s of Silicon Valley are launching more and more powerful systems seemingly every week!

Tell Congress:

Congress should be doing everything it can to protect the American people from Silicon Valley’s reckless AI arms race, not giving Big Tech a decade to do whatever it wants with no accountability or constraints. Reject the 10-year moratorium, introduced by Senator Ted Cruz, on state and local laws regulating artificial intelligence.

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- Robert Weissman & Lisa Gilbert, Co-Presidents of Public Citizen
 
 
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