California Looks to Europe to Rein in AI

AFP/APP

San Francisco: California, home to Silicon Valley, is eager to rein in the deployment of artificial intelligence and is looking to Europe’s tough-on-big-tech approach for inspiration.

California, the richest state in the United States by GDP, is a hotbed of no-holds-barred tech innovation, but lawmakers in the state capital, Sacramento, want to give the industry the laws and guardrails it has largely been spared in the internet age.

Brussels has enacted a barrage of laws on US-dominated tech and sprinted to pass the AI Act after OpenAI’s Microsoft-backed ChatGPT arrived on the scene in late 2022, unleashing a global AI race.

“What we’re trying to do is actually learn from the Europeans, but also work with the Europeans and figure out how to put regulations in place on AI,” said David Harris, senior policy advisor at the California Initiative for Technology and Democracy.

As they have in the past with EU laws on private data, lawmakers in California are looking to recent European legislation on AI, especially given the little hope of equivalent national legislation out of Washington.

There are at least 30 different bills proposed by California state legislators that relate to various aspects of AI, according to Harris, who said he has advised officials here and in Europe on such laws.

Proposed laws in California range from requiring AI makers to reveal what was used to train models to banning election ads containing any computer-generated features.

“One of the aspects I think is really important is the question of how we deal with deepfakes or fake text created to look like a human being sending you messages,” Harris told AFP.