Artificial intelligence will be the hottest topic next week when legislators descend on Louisville, Ky., for a summit hosted by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
AI is being featured in eight separate sessions scheduled during the Aug. 5-7 conference. It will be discussed during a meeting of NCSL’s Task Force on AI, Cybersecurity and Privacy, and by a task force on health innovations.
And it will even come up at after-hour events. Google, for instance, is hosting a reception for state legislators to learn more about AI innovations, according to an invitation shared with Pluribus News.
The all-out blitz reflects the attention legislatures across the country have paid to the high-stakes technology, which holds great promise for advancements across society and wields the potential for unseen hazards.
“As we hear from experts on AI, and share some of our own legislative proposals with each other, each legislator will be better equipped to return to their state house and deliver solutions to their constituents’ AI concerns,” California Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin (D), co-chair of the AI task force, told Pluribus News.
NCSL standing committees will consider a series of resolutions related to AI. One calls for Congress to consult with states on AI regulations and not preempt state efforts to corral the technology. Another encourages a state-federal joint effort to encourage the insurance industry to provide liability coverage for advanced AI systems.
Both are before the Technology and Communications Committee. The Banking, Financial Services and Insurance Committee will also consider a pair of AI resolutions.
The focus on AI builds upon a busy year in U.S. statehouses, as lawmakers took initial steps to regulate the burgeoning industry. The bulk of the action centered on laws governing AI-generated deep fakes, but some states sought to go much further.
Colorado lawmakers passed a first-in-the-nation comprehensive AI regulation law. Tennessee lawmakers enacted a novel law protecting singers from having AI steal their voices. Several AI regulation bills are still pending in California’s legislature.
Read more: 6 major AI bills passed in ’24
The NCSL Summit AI sessions will focus on the opportunities and challenges the technology presents for states, examine how AI can be used and abused in the context of elections, address AI’s potential to improve health care and human services, and explore its effects on the workforce.
Other sessions will concentrate specifically on AI’s public sector use, including how legislative staff can productively deploy the technology, the ethical implication of AI use by governments, and ways states can use AI to improve the delivery of services.
The conference will kick off with a keynote speech by Jennifer Pahlka, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and former U.S. deputy chief technology officer, who wrote the book “Recoding America” about government’s failures to embrace the digital age.
In testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs in January, Pahlka urged the U.S. government to build both capacity and competency around AI to harness its benefits.
“This critical AI moment calls for enablement,” Pahlka said in prepared remarks to the committee. “We may be able to make progress by applying AI, but not if we double down on the remedies that failed in the Internet Age and hope they somehow work in the age of AI. We must finally commit to the hard work of building digital capacity.”
Rapid advancements in AI also have implications for the workforces of the future. One of the NCSL sessions will focus on helping state legislators think about strategies for creating an AI-ready workforce, including establishing non-degree pathways to jobs in the sector.
The panel will feature Amanda Ballantyne, executive director of the AFL-CIO’s Tech Institute, which aims to give workers a seat at the table as technologies change the nature of work.
State lawmakers are primarily focused on establishing guardrails for private sector AI use. But there is also growing interest in how governments might deploy the technology to improve the delivery of services and customer service.
Connecticut Sen. James Maroney (D), who last year led the passage of a law that requires state agencies to inventory their AI use, will appear on a panel with representatives from IBM and Deloitte that will focus on how state policymakers can “seamlessly and fairly” incorporate AI into state government’s work.
“We need to lead by example with safe and trustworthy uses [of AI],” Maroney said in an interview. “AI will definitely help us improve the level of services that we provide our constituents, but we need to do so in a thoughtful way.”
Maroney this year attempted to get passed a comprehensive AI regulation aimed at private sector use of the technology. The Colorado bill that passed was modeled on Maroney’s legislation. He plans to try again next year.
While at NCSL, Maroney also plans to informally convene members of a bipartisan, multistate working group of state lawmakers who have been huddling virtually to discuss how to regulate AI.
Since last year, multiple governors have issued executive orders on AI. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) order encourages its use by state agencies while also requiring safeguards..
Christian Moriarty, a professor of ethics and law at St. Petersburg College, will speak at NCSL on the ethics of government AI use. He plans to caution lawmakers about the potential for AI systems to make biased decisions and produce false information known as hallucinations.
Moriarty said he will also emphasize the importance of training employees to use AI properly, the need for AI systems to have human oversight, and the importance of not feeding private information into the training data.
“I’m certainly not opposed to the use of AI. … We just have to be sure to use it ethically and responsibly and have policies around its use, particularly in the public sector,” Moriarty told Pluribus News.
This is part of a series of stories previewing the 2024 NCSL Legislative Summit:
As EV demand grows, states navigate obstacles to expand infrastructure
Pluribus Spotlight: NCSL chief executive Tim Storey
States expand Medicaid to cover incarcerated individuals pre-release