As a congressional competition To pass President Donald Trump’s “big beauty bill,” which is also to appease many haters of the bill’s “AI Moratorium” clause, initially needed to pause for 10 years on state AI regulations.
The rule, advocated by White House AI Czar and venture capitalist David Sacks, proved to be extremely unpopular, including a variety of lawmakers, from 40 state attorneys generals to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the representative of the Superma Gali. On Sunday night, Senator Marsha Blackburn and Senator Ted Cruz announced a new version of AI Moratorium, which dropped pauses from ten to five years to five years and added various carvings. But Blackburn reversed the course Monday night after critics attacked a watered version of the bill.
“While I thank Chairman Cruz for his efforts to find an acceptable language that enables states to protect their citizens from AI abuse, the current language is unacceptable for those who need these protections the most,” Blackburn said in a statement from Wired. “This provision could allow large technologies to continue to leverage children, creators, and conservatives. Until Congress passes federal preemptive legislation such as the Children’s Online Safety Act and the online privacy framework, we cannot prevent states from making laws that protect their citizens.”
For those who tracked at home, Blackburn initially opposed the suspension, then worked with Cruz to make a five-year rule before changing his mind again to oppose his own version of the legal compromise.
She has traditionally advocated regulations that protect the music industry, a major economic player in her hometown of Tennessee. Last year, Tennessee passed a law to block the in-depth champions of AI music artists. The AI provisions she proposed include immunities to such laws, which expand the legal right to protect their portraits from commercial exploitation. The suspension version she and Cruz proposed on Sunday also has national laws targeting “unfair or deceptive behavior or practice, online safety of children, material for child sexual abuse, right to propaganda, protecting people’s names, images, voices or similarities.”
Despite these carvings, the new AI regulations have been met with strong opposition from a wide variety of organizations and individuals, from the long, long international and warehouse alliances (“Dangerous Federation over”) to Steve Bannon (“They will do all the dirty work in the first five years.”).
The paused engraving language comes with a warning that exempt state laws cannot impose an “improper or disproportionate burden” on AI systems or “automatic decision-making systems.” With AI and algorithm sources embedded in algorithms in social platforms, critics such as Senator Maria Cantwell see the language of the provision as “a brand new shield against litigation and state regulations.”
Many advocacy groups and legal experts focused on these issues, including child safety rules, say the new AI regulations are still incredibly destructive. Danny Weiss, chief advocacy officer for nonprofit common sense media, said this version is still “extremely scanned” due to inappropriate burden shields, “it could affect almost every effort in security to regulate security.”
