Alabama U.S. Sen. Katie Britt is calling for guardrails on artificial intelligence chatbots because of the potential to harm minors.
“I have met with a number of parents who have told me devastating stories about their children, where chatbots ultimately – when they kind of peeled everything back – had isolated them from their parents, had talked to them about suicide, had talked to them about a number of things,” Britt told CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday on a special edition of State of the Union, which focused on the threat of Big Tech and artificial intelligence.
“And you think about this, if these AI companies can make the most brilliant machines in the world, they could do us all a service by putting up proper guardrails that did not allow for minors to utilize these things.”
She has co-sponsored a bill, Guidelines for User Age-Verification and Responsible Dialogue (Guard) Act, that would ban AI companions for minors and require AI chatbots to disclose that they are not human. It would also make criminally liable the companies that design or develop chatbots that encourage or promote suicide, self-injury, physical violence or sexual violence.
“The truth is (that) these AI companies can absolutely do much of this on their own,” she told Tapper.
“But we know consistently, time and time again, whether it’s been social media companies or now some of the AI space that we consistently see people putting their profits over actual people.”
The mother of two teenagers said it’s time to review the so-called Section 230 immunity for social media.
“When you’re looking at what’s happening right now with sextortion and young people, when you’re looking at what’s happening right now with the bullying online and what not, you know, if these things were happening in a storefront on a main street in Alabama, we would shut that store down,” she said.
“But we are not able to do that. The liability shield that we see in these social media companies and to an extent in this AI space has to be taken down because people need to be held accountable.”