AI Senate Hearing: Experts Testify On Regulation And Government Action For Generative AI

Last Tuesday the AI senate hearing took place, where the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, IBM chief privacy and trust officer Christina Montgomery, and NYU emeritus professor Gary Marcus, testified in front of the privacy, technology, and law subcommittee for three hours on how the government should act on generative AI.

To show how AI has impacted our present Sen. Blumenthal opened with a statement with remarks written by ChatGPT and an AI deepfake voice of his actual voice.

The hearing focused on how to implement regulation and the idea of regulating AI received bipartisan support. Senate Judiciary Chair Sen. Dick Durbin proposed the creation of a new agency dedicated to overseeing AI.

“We’re dealing with innovation that doesn’t necessarily have a boundary. We may create a great U.S. agency — and I hope that we do — that may have jurisdiction over U.S. corporations and U.S. activity that doesn’t have a thing to do with what’s gonna bombard us from outside,” he said.

Surprisingly Altman and Montgomery were willing to cooperate with the idea of being regulated. Altman even said he was looking for regulations at a global level.

Another big point in the hearing was the 2024 elections. Everybody agreed that AI could be a source of misinformation. Altman agreed.

“It’s one of my areas of greatest concern — the more general capability of these models to manipulate, to persuade, to provide sort of one-on-one disinformation,” Altman said.

The hearing also addressed other issues that AI could generate, such as employment, intellectual property, privacy, and safety. With both parties supporting the needs of regulations, it appears that AI has finally united the U.S.