Should AI Make Us Want A National Privacy Law?

0:01Today on the AI Breakdown, we're reading a piece from a sitting US Congresswoman around AI and privacy laws. The AI Breakdown is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Go to breakdown.network for more information about our newsletter, our Discord, and our YouTube channel.

0:24Hello, friends. Happy Labor Day weekend. Now, this weekend, for the long read, I wanted to look at a piece from a sitting U.S. Congresswoman. Suzanne Del Bene is a representative from Washington, and is also the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Now, her background makes her well-suited to be discussing artificial intelligence and other technology issues, particularly relative to her peers in Congress. Between 1989 and 1998, Congresswoman Delbeni worked at Microsoft. She was a director of marketing and BD for the Interactive Media Group, worked in marketing and sales training for Microsoft's Internet Properties, and also worked on product management roles for Windows 95 as well as Microsoft IE.

1:03In 1998, she became part of the dot-com movement, helping found drugstore.com, and in 2000, she became CEO of Nimble Technology, eventually leading it to acquisition. From 2004 to 2007, she returned to Microsoft as a corporate VP, and so the point is, especially as Congress people go, this is someone who has significantly more experience with technology than the average one of her peers. The piece that she wrote was published on August 28th in Newsweek and was called Want protection from AI, the first step is a national privacy law. Let's read it and then we'll have a bit more of a conversation after.

1:40Congresswoman Delbeni begins, In the six months since a new chatbot confessed its love for a reporter, before taking a darker turn, the world has woken up to how artificial intelligence can dramatically change our lives and how it can go awry. AI is quickly being integrated into nearly every aspect of our economy and daily lives. Yet in our nation's capital, laws aren't keeping up with the rapid evolution of technology. Policymakers have many decisions to make around artificial intelligence, like how it can be used in sensitive areas such as financial markets, healthcare, and national security.

2:13They will need to decide intellectual property rights around AI-created content. There will also need to be guardrails to prevent the dissemination of mis - and disinformation. But before we build the second and third story of this regulatory house, we need to lay a strong foundation and that must center around a national data privacy standard. To understand this bedrock need, it's important to look at how artificial intelligence was developed. AI needs an immense quantity of data. The generative language tool ChatGPT was trained on 45 terabytes of data, or the equivalent of over 200 days worth of HD video.

2:45That information may have included our posts on social media and online forums that have likely taught ChatGPT how we write and communicate with each other. That's because this data is largely unprotected and widely available to third-party companies willing to pay for it. AI developers do not need to disclose where they get their input data from because the U.S. has no national privacy law. While data studies have existed for centuries and can have major benefits, they are often centered around consent to use that information. Medical studies often use patient health data and outcomes, but that information needs the approval of the study participants in most cases.

3:18That's because in the 1990s, Congress gave health information a basic level of protection, but that law only protects data shared between patients and their healthcare providers. The same is not true for other health platforms like fitness apps or most other data we generate today, including our conversations online and geolocation information. Currently, the companies that collect our data are in control of it. Google for years scanned Gmail inboxes to sell users' targeted ads before abandoning the practice. Zoom recently had to update its data collection policy after it was accused of using customers' audio and video to train its AI products.

3:50We've all downloaded an app on our phone and immediately accepted the terms and conditions window without actually reading it. Companies can and often do change the terms regarding how much of our information they collect and how they use it. A national privacy standard would ensure a baseline set of protections no matter where someone lives in the U.S., and it would restrict companies from storing and selling our personal data. Ensuring there's transparency and accountability in what data goes into AI is also important for a quality and responsible product. If input data is biased, we're going to get a biased outcome.

4:19In other words, garbage in, garbage out. Facial recognition is one application of artificial intelligence. These systems have, by and large, been trained by and with data from white people. That's led to clear biases when communities of color interact with this technology. The United States must be a global leader on artificial intelligence policy. But other countries are not waiting as we sit still. The European Union has moved faster on AI regulations because it passed its privacy law in 2018. The Chinese government has also moved quickly on AI, though in an alarmingly anti-democratic way. If we want a seat at the international table to set the long-term direction for AI that reflects our core American values, we must have our own national data privacy law to start.

4:58The Biden administration has taken some encouraging steps to begin putting guardrails around AI, but it has been constrained by Congress's inaction. The White House recently announced voluntary artificial intelligence standards, which include a section on data privacy. Voluntary guidelines don't come with accountability, and the federal government can only enforce the rules on the books, which are woefully outdated. That's why Congress needs to step up and set the rules of the road. Strong national standards like privacy must be uniform throughout the country rather than the state-by-state approach we have now.

5:25It has to put people back in control of their information instead of companies. It must also be enforceable so that the government can hold bad actors accountable. These are the components of the legislation I have introduced over the past few Congresses and the bipartisan proposal the Energy and Commerce Committee advanced last year. As with all things in Congress, it comes down to a matter of priorities. With artificial intelligence expanding so fast, we can no longer wait to take up this issue. We were behind on technology policy already, but we are falling further behind as other countries take the lead.

5:52We must act quickly and set a robust foundation that has to include a strong enforceable national privacy standard. All right, back to NLW here. A couple things that are interesting about this. One, the cynical among you might notice that one of the things that's happening with AI, and this always happens with any big new hot button political issue, is that people use it as a way to get other politicians and the electorate to pay attention to the thing that they've long cared about. As Congresswoman Del Bene says, she's introduced privacy legislation over the past few Congresses, but hasn't been able to get enough traction for it.

6:24Now she is pointing out that AI puts a new urgency upon that need. Now in this case, she's absolutely right, and the stretch isn't really a stretch at all. But it's just interesting because I do think that you're going to see lots and lots of politicians try to use AI as a way to put whatever it is that they care about most on the agenda. Relating to that though, it's not necessarily the worst thing to start to take on specific sub-issues within the broader set of questions around AI and try to address them if and where there is consensus around those particular sub-issues. What I mean by that is that there's a temptation among legislators and regulators to create big banner landmark legislation that covers everything, a US comparison to the EU AI Act as a four example.

7:06However, in a politically divided United States, there is some logic to trying to get small wins that cumulatively add up to the type of guardrails that everyone seems to be interested in. There are going to be some issues around AI that are particularly thorny, and other issues that are fairly straightforward. And so I think it's actually encouraging to see people who are focusing on, as in this case, something that is perhaps a smaller issue relative to the larger world of AI, even if of course privacy is in of itself a huge issue in general. The other thing that makes this particularly acute and important in the context of artificial intelligence is that it would be, as we've seen, very, very easy to get lost in the really big stuff, to get lost in the battle against China, to get lost in extinction risk, instead of addressing one by one really important issues like these questions of copyright, like these questions of data training standards, like these questions of transparency around what data models were trained on.

8:02Now, the interesting balance here when it comes to this urgency that Congresswoman DelBene and others feel is that it has to be matched with a period of learning for many of these congresspeople who simply haven't engaged with this issue before. I would rather it take a few months longer to get good legislation than to get bad legislation right away. Theoretically, we have a set of forums coming up set by Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, which will hopefully do some amount of work on that topic, but we really, really need Congress to get this one right. I think that we are going to see many more op-eds like this coming forward, especially as this becomes a more salient and concerning issue leading into the 2024 election.

8:41Ultimately, the fact that you already have members of Congress writing in Newsweek about AI shows just how fast it's entered the mainstream conversation and become a legislative priority. Anyways, interesting stuff and lots to chew on over this Labor Day weekend. Speaking of which, I hope you are having a great one. Thanks as always for listening or watching. And until next time, peace.

9:11Thank you.