STATES TARGET AI'S HIDDEN HAND IN AMERICANS' LIVES

While artificial intelligence made headlines with ChatGPT, behind the scenes, the technology has quietly pervaded everyday life - screening job resumes, rental apartment applications, and even determining medical care in some cases.

While a number of AI systems have been found to discriminate, tipping the scales in favor of certain races, genders or incomes, there's scant government oversight.

Lawmakers in at least seven states are taking big legislative swings to regulate bias in artificial intelligence, filling a void left by Congress' inaction. These proposals are some of the first steps in a decades-long discussion over balancing the benefits of this nebulous new technology with the widely documented risks.

"AI does in fact affect every part of your life whether you know it or not," said Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a Brown University professor who co-authored the White House's Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.

"Now, you wouldn't care if they all worked fine. But they don't."

Success or failure will depend on lawmakers working through complex problems while negotiating with an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars and growing at a speed best measured in lightyears.

Last year, only about a dozen of the nearly 200 Al-related bills introduced in statehouses were passed into law, according to BSA The Software Alliance, which advocates on behalf of software companies.

Those bills, along with the over 400 Al-related bills being debated this year, were largely aimed at regulating smaller slices of Al. That includes nearly 200 targeting deepfakes, including proposals to bar pornographic deepfakes, like those of Taylor Swift that flooded social media. Others are trying to rein in chatbots, such as ChatGPT, to ensure they don't cough up instructions to make a bomb, for example.

Those are separate from the seven state bills that would apply across industries to regulate AI discrimination - one of the technology's most perverse and complex problems - being debated from California to Connecticut.