You’ve probably seen by now that many of the more obnoxious provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill were stripped out of the Senate version. One of those provisions was a 10-year moratorium on any of the 50 states imposing regulations on AI. Conservatives aren’t normally big on regulating any industry, but in this case, this was the right move. AI needs to be regulated quickly, before it kills too many more people.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was the one who included the AI provision in the bill. He used all the usual bombastic fearmongering to justify preventing any regulation.
“What if China wins the race? What then?”
Well, what if they do, Senator? Why won’t anyone answer this simple question: What is the “danger” if China builds their little robot brain faster than us? What will happen?
They never answer that.
Politicians in DC are excited about AI because the tech companies are flush with investor cash. They’re lining their pockets and reassuring the tech companies that there won’t be any federal regulations imposed on this technology, which is causing lonely teenagers and adults to kill themselves; causing couples to get divorced; and getting people involuntarily committed to mental hospitals for having psychotic breaks after chatting with AI.
We’re not going to regulate that for a decade? Seriously?
Futurism magazine has been documenting the tragic stories of what AI has been doing to Americans all across the country. People are committing suicide, sliding into homelessness, or going flat-out bonkers after using ChatGPT or some other chatbot software.
One story is about a married man who became convinced that he had summoned a “god” through AI. He told his wife that he had “broken” math and physics, and that it was now up to him to save the world. His wife went to gas up the car because she was worried she wouldn’t have enough fuel to get him to the hospital. When she got back home, he had a rope around his neck.
Another story is about a 40-year-old married man with children. He started using ChatGPT at work to help speed up some boring administrative tasks. His wife called the police for help when she found him crawling around in the backyard, speaking gibberish.
Two weeks later, he snapped out of it in the mental hospital. He explained that he had been trying to alter the fabric of the universe by “speaking backward in time.” This man had zero history of mental health problems. He was a perfectly normal guy with a wife and kids. He’d been using ChatGPT at work for just two weeks for administrative tasks before he found himself crawling on the ground and thinking he had superhero powers.
Now imagine a lonely 10-year-old who jumps on ChatGPT every day when she gets home from school. Do you still think we don’t need any regulatory guardrails on this technology? One family in Florida is already suing an AI company, after its chatbot successfully convinced their lonely 14-year-old boy to kill himself. As we’re seeing, even many adults can’t tell that these chatbots are just software. What chance do vulnerable kids have when they use these tools?
That’s why Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) both fought to get the moratorium on regulating AI taken out of the bill. Kids are already being hurt by this technology.
Scientists at MIT just published a study on how the use of AI is impacting the brains of white-collar employees who use it extensively at work. After just six months of heavy ChatGPT use, every employee will lose an average of 49 to 79 neural connections in their brain. College students who have used AI for the past two years to do most of their schoolwork are losing the ability to speak their native language, due to the loss of too many neural connections.
Multiple states are already trying to regulate AI, because people are getting harmed by it. This includes red states and blue states. Some of the rules being proposed are aimed at protecting children, preventing AI from producing child porn and deepfakes, and preventing companies from using AI to discriminate against white people in hiring. Can Ted Cruz explain why any of those would be bad things?
So, the very good news is that states are going to be allowed to regulate AI. We just hope they do it before too many more people get hurt or killed.