California Lawmakers Take On AI Regulation With a Host of Bills
By Rachael Myrow
It’s been eight months since Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the outfit that gave us ChatGPT, urged U.S. senators to please pass new laws to force accountability from the big players, like OpenAI investor Microsoft, as well as Amazon, Google and Meta. “The number of companies is going to be small, just because of the resources required, and so I think there needs to be incredible scrutiny on us and our competitors,” Altman said in May of 2023.
Yeah, no. That’s not what has happened...
The opposing view: “While I think that these types of regulatory guidelines are good, I’m not sure how effective they will be,” said Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley School of Information professor specializing in digital forensics, misinformation, and human perception.
The bottom line: Farid added, “I don’t think it makes sense for individual states to try to regulate in this space, but if any state is going to do it, it should be California. The upside of state regulation is that it puts more pressure on the federal government to act so that we don’t end up with a chaotic state-by-state regulation of tech...”
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley and a senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project.
