[Senate Hearing 118-40]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 118-40
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AND HUMAN RIGHTS
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE LAW
of the
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
JUNE 13, 2023
__________
Serial No. J-118-21
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
00-000 WASHINGTON : 2024
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois, Chair
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina,
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, Rhode Island Ranking Member
AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa
CHRISTOPHER A. COONS, Delaware JOHN CORNYN, Texas
RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut MICHAEL S. LEE, Utah
MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii TED CRUZ, Texas
CORY A. BOOKER, New Jersey JOSH HAWLEY, Missouri
ALEX PADILLA, California TOM COTTON, Arkansas
JON OSSOFF, Georgia JOHN KENNEDY, Louisiana
PETER WELCH, Vermont THOM TILLIS, North Carolina
MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee
Joseph Zogby, Chief Counsel and Staff Director
Katherine Nikas, Republican Chief Counsel and Staff Director
Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law
JON OSSOFF, Georgia, Chair
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee,
RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut Ranking Member
PETER WELCH, Vermont JOHN KENNEDY, Louisiana
JOSH HAWLEY, Missouri
Sara Schaumburg, Democratic Chief Counsel
Kaitlyn Lane, Republican Chief Counsel
C O N T E N T S
----------
JUNE 13, 2023, 2:36 P.M.
STATEMENTS OF COMMITTEE MEMBERS
Page
Ossoff, Hon. Jon, a U.S. Senator from the State of Georgia....... 1
Blackburn, Hon. Marsha, a U.S. Senator from the State of
Tennessee...................................................... 2
WITNESSES
Witness List..................................................... 31
Cain, Geoffrey, senior fellow, Foundation for American
Innovation, Chicago, Illinois.................................. 11
prepared statement........................................... 32
DeStefano, Jennifer, Victim of AI Deepfake Kidnapping and
Extortion Scam, Scottsdale, Arizona............................ 4
prepared statement........................................... 40
Givens, Alexandra Reeve, president and chief executive officer,
Center for Democracy and Technology, Washington, DC............ 9
prepared statement........................................... 47
Madry, Aleksander, Cadence Design Systems, Professor of
Computing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge,
Massachusetts.................................................. 7
prepared statement........................................... 58
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AND HUMAN RIGHTS
----------
TUESDAY, JUNE 13, 2023
United States Senate,
Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law,
Committee on the Judiciary,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice at 2:36 p.m., in
Room 226, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Jon Ossoff,
Chair of the Subcommittee, presiding.
Present: Senators Ossoff [presiding], Blumenthal, Welch,
Blackburn, Kennedy, and Hawley.
Also present: Chair Durbin and Senator Padilla.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JON OSSOFF,
A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF GEORGIA
Chair Ossoff. The Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law
will come to order. Welcome all to today's hearing. It is great
to see a packed house. It demonstrates the intensity of
interest in this subject. I want to thank you, Ranking Member
Blackburn, for working so hard and so closely with me to
develop this important bipartisan hearing. And I want to thank
each of our witnesses for your participation today.
Throughout history, transformative technologies have
emerged with the potential to disrupt societies, economies, and
politics profoundly and sometimes very quickly. Machine
learning and artificial intelligence may be such a technology.
AI capabilities are growing rapidly and in ways even its
creators cannot predict. And already it's changing our lives.
American families are now threatened by AI-enabled scams made
far more sophisticated through this technology than traditional
spam email or sham telemarketing calls.
Today we will hear from Jennifer DeStefano, who was
targeted by a scam using a deepfake of her 15-year-old
daughter's voice to fake her kidnapping and extort a ransom
payment.
AI also has profound implications for civil rights, for the
criminal justice system, for our democratic and constitutional
processes, and for our privacy. Its potential impact on the
future of work could include fundamental shifts in education,
in recruitment, candidate screening and hiring, and perhaps
even more significantly, rapid disruption of labor markets as
certain professions are automated.
This technology has profound implications for the future of
warfare, as kill chains are automated and predictive technology
influences and mediates competition between nation states. As
AI technology develops, great powers competing in an AI arms
race engaged in strategic competition, where AI is influencing
the decisions made by leaders and militaries, face a different
and new risk of escalation and miscalculation.
And some influential technologists and engineers, including
prominent figures and prominent leaders of the industry, warn
of existential risks ranging from catastrophic political
destabilization to the development and deployment of weapons of
mass destruction, to catastrophic cybersecurity threats, and to
unforeseeable and unknown forms of risk that may emerge
alongside more and more powerful forms of artificial
intelligence.
Our study of these technologies and associated risks should
not blind us, of course, to this technology's extraordinary
potential. For example, cancer diagnoses, the development of
new life-saving drugs and therapies, productivity growth, and
the new forms of technological innovation that AI itself could
help us to unlock.
But at a moment like this, it is imperative that Congress
understand the full range of risks and potentials to ensure
this technology can be developed, deployed, used, and regulated
consistent with our core values, consistent with our national
interest, consistent with civil and human rights. So I look
forward to a productive conversation with this talented and
extraordinary panel this afternoon. And with that, I turn to
the Ranking Member of the Subcommittee, my colleague from
Tennessee, Senator Blackburn.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. MARSHA BLACKBURN,
A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF TENNESSEE
Senator Blackburn. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am delighted
that we're getting the Subcommittee off the starting blocks
today. So I thank you and your team for the good work on those
efforts and focusing on something where we do share an
interest, which is artificial intelligence and technology, and
the uses that you say, for good or for bad.
I do want to touch on China, and I'm so pleased that we're
looking at this from the human rights angle. I've watched what
has happened in China and how they are using AI to grow the
surveillance state. And they're very aggressive in this. And we
know that they have used it--a good example is the way they
have exploited vulnerabilities in Apple's iPhone in the
iMessage system to surveil and track the Uyghur Muslims in
Xinjiang Province.
And the CCP uses facial recognition as a part of their
tracking, and a part of their data, and the logging of
information that they do as they're following people. And we
want to dive into that a little bit. We know that China is
pushing to win the race on AI. They've been very upfront about
this, and they are looking to win the race on other
technologies.
Quantum computing, 5G, 6G, anything that they see as
groundbreaking that helps them to control environments,
situations, and people. I think the data from McKinsey &
Company should be something that we all look at and take to
heart. They predict that by 2030, China's growth in AI could
account for up to $600 billion in economic value. And this is
exactly what they want.
And in 2017, the National AI Development Plan that they
brought forward, China declared its goal of becoming the world
leader in AI by 2030. And they're pursuing this. They're the
most aggressive filer of patents for AI technologies. They are
constantly challenging our innovators through the PTAB process.
So we should be watching their goals. And this should
concern each and every one of us who cares about preserving the
freedoms and the democratic values that we hold here in
America. As we work to deploy AI technologies here, we need to
make a conscious effort to consider the potential impact that
those technologies could have on human rights and on how we
approach issues such as data collection, data retention,
surveillance, and, of course, deepfakes.
This is not to say that we should halt AI development in
its tracks or look at approaches that would regulate it out of
existence. To the contrary, doing that would practically
guarantee that China becomes the world's leader in AI, giving
it the opening that President Xi wants to impose the CCP's
authoritarian values around the world. But we do need to think
carefully about how we deploy AI technologies in the absence of
a national privacy law, which we still do not have, a Federal
online consumer privacy protection.
We also need to be careful about how we identify and how we
stop unauthorized utilizations of AI, whether to surveil or to
scam unsuspecting people. So to our witnesses, thank you for
being with us today. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the hearing.
Look forward to moving to questions.
Chair Ossoff. Thank you, Senator Blackburn. I will now
introduce our witnesses, and thank you, again, for joining us
today.
Ms. Jennifer DeStefano, mother from Arizona, was the victim
of a horrifying scam using an AI-generated deepfake of her
daughter's voice to fake her kidnapping and demand a ransom.
Ms. DeStefano, I think every parent in America who read your
story was chilled to the bone by what you experienced. We'll
hear from you, Ms. DeStefano, about your experience to help
shed light on how AI is being used to supercharge extortion-
based scams and threaten the safety of American families.
Dr. Aleksander Madry is a nationally recognized expert on
AI and machine learning whose research focuses on how to ensure
AI tools are reliable and well-enough understood to be safely
and responsibly deployed in the real world. Thank you, Dr.
Madry.
Ms. Alexandra Reeve Givens is the CEO of the Center for
Democracy and Technology, which works to ensure emerging
technologies protect democratic values and advance human
rights.
And Mr. Geoffrey Cain is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation
for American Innovation, a technologist and author who studies
how repressive governments deploy novel technologies and how
democracies can respond and defend human rights.
Thank you all so much for joining. Before your opening
statements we will swear in our witnesses. If you would all
please rise and raise your right hands?
[Witnesses are sworn in.]
Chair Ossoff. Let the record reflect the witnesses have
responded in the affirmative. You may be seated. And Ms.
DeStefano, we'll begin please with your opening statement.
You'll see some lights indicating time, but we want to make
sure you have time to tell your whole story. So don't worry too
much about the clock. We're eager to hear from you. And you may
begin.
STATEMENT OF JENNIFER DeSTEFANO, VICTIM OF AI DEEP-
FAKE KIDNAPPING AND EXTORTION SCAM, SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA
Ms. DeStefano. Thank you so much, Senator. I appreciate
that. Good afternoon, Senators. It is my great honor to speak
with you today and share my experience on how artificial
intelligence is being weaponized to not only invoke fear and
terror in the American public but in the global community at
large as it capitalizes on and redefines what we have known as
familiar.
I would like to take this moment to thank Senator Ossoff
for inviting me to be here today, and I'd also like to thank
Senator Blackburn for your concern on this ever-evolving topic
and community threat. AI is revolutionizing and unraveling the
very foundation of our social fabric by creating doubt and fear
in what was once never questioned, the sound of a loved one's
voice.
What is familiar? How many times have you received a phone
call from your child and asked them to verify who is calling?
How many times has a loved one reached out to you in despair
and you stopped them to validate their identity? Did you hang
up on them? Did you require to call them back to make sure you
are speaking to the correct person? The answer is, more than
likely, never. The sound of a loved one's voice is often never
authenticated. It has a unique identity, as unique as a
fingerprint. This familiar identity is innate and is designed
by God. It is what binds a mother to their child and a newborn
infant to their mother.
January 20th was a typical Friday afternoon for our family,
kicking off a weekend of races and rehearsals. We often divide
our family across the State. It's divide and conquer. My
husband was with our older daughter, Brie, training for a ski
race, and I was with my younger daughter, Aubrey, picking her
up from a rehearsal at dance. Brie had not raced in years and
promised me that she would take it easy.
At about 4:53 p.m., I received a call from an unknown
number upon exiting my car. At the final ring I chose to answer
it, as unknown calls we're very familiar with--can often be a
hospital or a doctor. It was Briana sobbing and crying, saying,
``Mom?'' At first, I thought nothing of it and casually asked
her, ``What happened?'' I had the phone on speaker, walking
through the parking lot to meet her sister.
Briana continued with, ``Mom, I messed up,'' crying and
sobbing continually. Not thinking twice, I asked her again,
``Okay, what happened?'' Suddenly, a man's voice barked at her,
``Lay down. Put your head back.'' At that moment, I started to
panic. My concern escalated as I demanded to know what was
going on. But nothing could have prepared me for her response
that she gave me next.
``Mom, these bad men have me. Help me, help me, help me.''
She begged and pleaded as the phone was taken from her. A
threatening and vulgar man took the call over. ``Listen here, I
have your daughter. You call anybody, you call the police, I'm
going to pop her stomach so full of drugs, I'm going to have my
way with her, I'm going to drop her in Mexico, and you'll never
see your daughter again.''
As I had my hand shaking on the door handle of the dance
studio, I ran inside and started screaming for help. The next
few minutes were every parent's worst nightmare. I was
fortunate to have a couple of moms there who knew me well, and
they instantly went to action.
One mom ran outside and called 911. My younger daughter
Aubrey was standing there listening to all the vulgar threats
this man was making that he was going to do to her sister. I
needed her help and asked her to start calling her dad, call
her brothers, call anybody we have to find her sister. She
stood there paralyzed in fear.
The second mom ran to Aubrey's aid and started making calls
to her dad. The kidnapper demanded a million dollars. That was
not possible. So then he decided on $50,000 in cash. That was
when the first mom came back in and told me that 911 is very
familiar with an AI scam where they can use someone's voice.
But I didn't process that. It wasn't just her voice. It was her
cries. It was her sobs. It was just not her voice. She said
okay and left.
I continued with the negotiations for the ransom. I asked
them for wiring instructions, routing numbers, but they
refused. Instead, they required me to get in a van with a bag
over my head with $50,000 in cash to be transported to my
daughter. If I didn't have all the money then we were both
going to be dead. I was shocked.
At that point in time the second mom came back to me, and
she had located my husband who had found Brie resting safely in
bed. She came to me and told me that Briana was safe, but I did
not believe her because I had just spoken to my daughter, and I
was very sure of her voice, and I was very sure of her cries.
So I demanded to talk to my daughter.
Briana got on the phone, and she had no idea what was going
on, and she kept reassuring me that she was safe. I asked her
so many times, ``Are you sure? Are you sure you're safe? Are
you sure you're with dad? I spoke to you. How can you be in
both places at once?'' I asked her over and over again. My mind
was whirling.
When I finally had the reassurance I needed, I knew she was
safe, and I was furious. I lashed at the men for the horrible
attempt to scam and extort money. They continued to threaten to
kill Brie. I made a promise that I was going to stop them and
they were never going to hurt my daughter nor anybody else
again.
At that point, I hung up and collapsed to the floor in
tears of relief. I called the police to pursue the matter, and
unfortunately, I was met with, ``It was a prank call,'' that it
happens often, and that there's nothing that can be done, and
that I probably am not in harm's way but it's not a guarantee.
They offered to have a police officer contact me, again from an
unknown number, as authorities are calling from blocked
numbers. But that's all they could offer. That certainly did
not make me feel better.
The bottom line was no actual crime had been committed, so
no physical kidnapping had taken place and no money had
transferred, period. The end. But that wasn't the end. It
couldn't be the end. If it was the end then how would this
nightmare ever stop? I stayed up all night paralyzed in fear.
``Do they know where I am? Do they know where my daughter is?
How did they get her voice? How did they get her crying, her
sobs that are unique to her?'' She is not a very public person.
I was wondering, ``Are we being cyber-stalked? Targeted?''
So many questions that were left unanswered. So I turned to
the community, and the responses were overwhelming. Friends and
neighbors came out of the woodwork with their stories.
Kidnapping, phone calls coming from their children's phones,
bags of money being driven halfway to Mexico, even voices of
young children nowhere to be found on social media who do not
have phones. The stories kept pouring in.
My own mother even received a phone call with my brother's
voice, claiming to be in an accident needing money for a
hospital bill. The common response that victims received from
authorities when reported was that nothing could be done. In
fact, one mother I know personally shared with me how she was
even mocked by her son's school and a security officer. The
caller even used her son's unique nickname to self-identify.
Fortunately, he was safe in class, and she was told this
happens all the time as her fear was dismissed.
Money scams have been around for thousands of years. This
is entirely different. This is terrorizing, lasting trauma.
Even months later sharing the story makes me shake to my core.
Aubrey was approached by a boy to hang out sometime, and she
concluded it was because he wants to kidnap her. That's not a
normal 13-year-old thought. It was my daughter's voice. It was
her cries. It was her sobs. It was the way she spoke.
I will never be able to shake that voice and the desperate
cries for help out of my mind. It's every parent's worst
nightmare to hear your child pleading with fear and pain,
knowing that they are being harmed and you're helpless. The
longer this form of terror remains unpunishable, the farther
and more egregious it will become. There is no limit to the
depth of evil AI can enable.
The thought crossed my mind before I hung up on the
kidnappers to follow through with the physical abduction of me.
Was that what it would take to bring this to an end? Was that
what it would take in order to have a punishable criminal
offense?
As our world moves at a lightning-fast pace, the human
element of familiarity that lays foundation to our social
fabric of what is known and what is truth is being
revolutionized with AI, some for good and some for evil. No
longer can we trust, ``Seeing is believing,'' or, ``I heard it
with my own ears,'' or even the sound of your own child's
voice.
The concept redefines and rewrites what the very meaning of
familiarity means. I ask you, when your mother calls are you
going to hang up on her and call her back to make sure it's
her? When your child calls in need of help will you end the
call and say, ``I don't believe it's really you''? Is this our
new normal? Is this the future we are creating by enabling the
abuses of artificial intelligence without consequence and
without regulation?
I want to thank you for your time and attention today.
Congress has a large and looming task ahead. How do we move
forward as a community with this haunting reality that is
plaguing us? If left uncontrolled, unregulated, and we are left
unprotected without consequence, it will rewrite our
understanding and perception of what is and what is not truth.
It will erode our sense of familiar as it corrodes our
confidence in what is real and what is not. This is a non-
partisan matter, and I've seen the hands reach across the aisle
in unified concern.
That gives me great hope. How to contain the ever-evolving
artificial intelligence and its unknowns is not an easy task.
My sincere thanks and humble appreciation for your time and
attention today. I thank all of you, especially Senator Ossoff
and the Senate at large, for tirelessly taking action to keep
our community and our world safe from the hands of evil. I am
one person, one story, but I'm not the only one. And I
certainly will not be the last unless action is taken. I wish
you Godspeed.
[The prepared statement of Ms. DeStefano appears as a
submission for the record.]
Chair Ossoff. Thank you, Ms. DeStefano, for sharing your
powerful and disturbing story. And we will in more detail
investigate all of the issues you've raised. I appreciate it.
Dr. Madry, it's now your turn for an opening statement. Thank
you.
STATEMENT OF ALEKSANDER MADRY, CADENCE DESIGN SYSTEMS,
PROFESSOR OF COMPUTING, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY,
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
Dr. Madry. Thank you. Chairman Ossoff, and Ranking Member
Blackburn, and Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting
me to testify today. I must say it's hard to follow this
testimony, in part because honestly it makes way better some of
the points I wanted to make, but let me try nonetheless.
So I want to focus my testimony on a single issue that I
find particularly salient, time sensitive, and really
unsettling: how AI could undermine our whole information
ecosystem, and with that erode how our society functions and
carries out democratic decisionmaking.
The newest wave of generative AI is poised to fundamentally
transform our collective sense making. And this is due to two
reasons. First, AI enables the creation of content that is not
only extremely realistic but also persuasive, even though it
may be false. Second, with AI, the creation of such content is
cheap and broadly accessible, making it frighteningly easy to
deploy at scale.
As a result, a whole spectrum of risks is emerging.
Firstly, traditional spam, scam, and phishing become even
easier to conduct. Also, AI can now convincingly impersonate a
human online or over the phone. That was a frightening but very
real experience that we just have heard about. So how will our
digital platforms cope with swarms of AI-driven bots that can
breeze through existing bot detection and moderation
algorithms?
And the worst thing is that such boosting of traditional
deception is just the beginning, not the end. So AI is now able
to create content that is both convincing and personalized.
This means that phishing no longer needs to involve generic
emails sent out to thousands of recipients. Instead, both the
message and the ensuing conversation can be fully automated and
customized to you.
AI is also bound to transform how we think about any
information campaign, be it ideological, political, or
commercial. Such campaigns will no longer need to rely on a
promoted message to go viral. Instead such campaigns they can
be filtered to generative AI that reaches an internet audience
individually and in a highly personalized manner.
So the hook to get you will not be some post that came
across your social media. Rather, it might be a Facebook friend
who is actually an AI-driven agent impersonating a human, a
friend that only subtly mixes in political commentary or
product endorsement into your engaging conversations.
Similarly, campaigning for a cause might no longer require
corralling a critical mass of people to do the outreach, be it
via direct calling or letter writing. Instead, a single actor
could fill such a campaign by themselves, using generative AI-
driven bots in place of people. Such a campaign would be
equally effective, but it would need neither the buy-in from
the broader population nor comparable resources. And as far as
I know, this would all probably be legal, too.
Also, AI doesn't just produce content that is personalized.
It can also make this content be personable. This could be used
to make interacting with AI not only persuasive but also
alluring to the point of being addictive. What if these
capabilities supercharge the attention economy, or rather
distraction economy, that we are having right now? How will we
feel about having our children be exposed to that?
Finally, AI is ushering us into the era where any record--a
contract, a deposition, a video--could be plausibly faked. How
does this affect our collective discourse as well as the legal
and governance system? All of these concerns may paint a rather
bleak picture, but there's actually much that can be done.
On the technical front, we need tools that help humans
judge the extent to which a given content was generated by a
human. However, these tools are still developing, and they will
not be a panacea. Rather, they can provide the necessary
friction that makes it harder to abuse AI capabilities. They
will also not work to the full extent, and in some cases at
all, without complementary policy developments.
In particular, the efficacy of these technical approaches
will hinge on how broadly adopted they are. Policy can
accelerate this process. Policies could also require any
consumer-facing, AI-generating content to be labeled as such.
And policy could also mandate providers of AI services to
implement adequate identification and reporting mechanisms.
Finally, we do need to work on AI literacy. I think that no
matter what happens in the end, the public needs to understand
how to judiciously interact with AI systems and to be on the
lookout for when they are actually interacting with AI in the
first place. We really do not want to learn this the hard way,
the way we have seen it over here.
So to conclude, I am really excited about the positive
impacts that AI can have, but we need to be mindful of the very
real risks, and we need to get started now. Thank you, and I'm
looking forward to the questions.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Madry appears as a
submission for the record.]
Chair Ossoff. Thank you, Dr. Madry. And I would note that
the Chair of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Durbin, has
arrived. Mr. Chairman, any remarks you'd like to make?
Ms. Givens, your opening statement, please.
STATEMENT OF ALEXANDRA REEVE GIVENS, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF
EXECUTIVE OFFICER, CENTER FOR DEMOCRACY AND TECHNOLOGY,
WASHINGTON, DC
Ms. Givens. Senators, thank you so much for inviting me to
testify. I'll say that I spent 5 years of my career sitting on
the benches right behind you, so it's a particular honor to be
in front of the Judiciary Committee today.
The world's attention is rightly focused on the
possibilities and risks of AI systems. As policymakers look to
address potential harms and promote responsible innovation,
it's essential that they do so with a focus on human rights,
including the rights to liberty, privacy, freedom of
expression, and equal treatment before the law. My testimony is
going to draw us a little broader to focus on two areas where
AI systems are already impacting these rights today: the use of
face recognition by law enforcement and the impact of
generative AI on elections.
In previous testimony I've described how AI systems are
also harming people's civil rights and economic mobility, for
example, when people are denied a job or housing based on
inferences made about them by an AI system or are wrongly
accused of fraud because a government agency uses a flawed AI
tool. These real-world harms are happening today.
So I hope the key takeaway of today's hearing is this: That
at a time when many are discussing the existential risks of AI,
there are concrete issues on which Congress and the executive
branch can act right now, and in doing so, demonstrate how AI
can be governed in a way that centers human rights.
Today, my organization partnered with the Leadership
Conference on Civil and Human Rights in over 60 civil society
groups, urging the Biden administration to expedite its good
work on these issues. These questions impact all sectors of
society, and there's much that both Congress and Federal
agencies can do.
A few words on AI and government surveillance. Last fall,
many of us were inspired by images of the brave protests
happening in Iran. But we weren't the only ones watching those
protests. In Iran today, face recognition allows the government
to identify protesters and take action against them. Face
recognition has also been invoked to police women not correctly
wearing the hijab, with one official threatening that violators
would face immediate penalties, such as their bank accounts
being blocked.
In this context, AI systems are enabling a repressive
regime to identify dissenters, surveil them, and automate their
punishment. AI is used in similar ways in China, as we'll hear,
and to intimidate peaceful protesters in Uganda, Hong Kong, and
more. Such examples feel far from the U.S., but there have
already been abuses here as well. Police in Florida and
Maryland have used face recognition to identify and harass
peaceful protesters, chilling Americans' free speech and right
to peacefully assemble.
Recently a Georgia resident, Randall Reid, was held in jail
for 6 days because a face recognition system misidentified him.
There are other accounts of wrongful arrests, and these are
likely just the tip of the iceberg. My testimony shows
recommendations for how Congress could regulate face
recognition. But importantly, this is just one area where
Congress could draw a clear contrast to autocratic regimes and
lead on AI right now.
Turning to my second example, advances in generative AI are
spurring creativity and innovation across the country and
around the world. But they also raise threats for human rights,
including in the context of elections. In past elections,
operatives used robocalls and texts to spread deceptive
information. But now bad actors could easily use AI to
exponentially grow and personalize voter suppression or other
targeting.
Generated images can also twist public understanding of
political figures and events. Videos and images have already
been digitally altered to compromise public officials. Fake
content is now cheaper, easier, and more convincing because of
the growth of AI tools.
Now, regulating in this space must be approached with care
because it involves expressive conduct. There are many
legitimate reasons why people use software to generate and
alter content, from artists making new works, to parody, to
researchers altering celebrity photos to show the hypothetical
impact of skin cancer. Barring or heavily restricting such
activities would harm free expression and innovation and
quickly run afoul of the First Amendment. But this doesn't mean
that leaders must sit idle. I'll briefly list four ways in
which Congress could act.
First, Congress could require the developers of AI systems
that can be used in high-risk settings to disclose how their
tools are developed and designed, and require testing for
elements such as safety, validity, explainability, non-
discrimination, and privacy.
Second, in some instances the appropriate framework to
address AI harms will be litigation under existing laws. For
example, fraud and extortion, harassment, civil rights,
intellectual property, and product liability. Courts are going
to have to tackle how these laws apply to new fact patterns,
and whether and when AI companies bear liability for the
content their tools produce versus downstream users. But
Congress can shine a light on these complex issues and act as
appropriate to fill in gaps through hearings and reports or an
expert commission.
Third, there's an urgent need for AI companies to develop
robust safety standards, as CEOs have said themselves in this
very building. Governments are pressing companies for near-term
voluntary agreements. Congress can help ensure that such
agreements are developed with public visibility and engagement
from civil society and independent experts.
Fourth and finally, on deepfake specifically, Congress can
use its funding and oversight to scale our Nation's capacity at
this critical time. This should include supporting the
development of detection technologies and ensuring key
institutions like law enforcement agencies are equipped to
quickly debunk manipulated content. My written testimony shares
more on each of these topics. Thank you, and I look forward to
your questions.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Givens appears as a
submission for the record.]
Chair Ossoff. Thank you, Ms. Givens. Mr. Cain.
STATEMENT OF GEOFFREY CAIN, SENIOR FELLOW, FOUNDATION FOR
AMERICAN INNOVATION, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Mr. Cain. Chairman Ossoff, Ranking Member Blackburn, and
Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to
testify here today. The Chinese Communist Party, or the CCP,
has seized on artificial intelligence to emerge as the greatest
threat to democracy and human dignity in the world today.
As an investigative journalist formerly in China, I was
among the first people to document and expose the horrific
surveillance state that oppressed the Uyghur population in the
far western region of Xinjiang. China used its vast AI-powered
surveillance system, literally called SkyNet. Since 2017, the
atrocity has morphed into the largest internment of ethnic
minorities since the Holocaust. The U.S. State Department calls
this a genocide.
In December 2017, I was kicked out of China while
researching my book, ``The Perfect Police State,'' which is a
book about the surveillance dystopia that has been built there.
Ever since then, the AI police state has expanded to alarming
levels. In 2018, I moved to Turkey and for 3 years tracked down
defected former intelligence officers from the Ministry of
State Security, the powerful intelligence body in China with a
global reach.
These spies from the Ministry told me that the Uyghur
genocide was the beginning of an experiment in total AI
surveillance. The CCP planned to enlist companies and then
expand the experiment nationwide in China and globally wherever
possible. In July 2017, China unveiled its National AI
Development Plan. It called AI a historic opportunity and
pledged to align development with the government's
authoritarian values. China has declared its goal as becoming
the world leader in AI by 2030.
Recently, the CCP unveiled AI-powered alarms that notify
the police when someone unfurls a banner, when a foreign
journalist is traveling to certain parts of the country, and
when someone from an ethnic minority is present. The companies
that helped build China's surveillance apparatus operate here
in America.
ByteDance, the megafirm that owns TikTok, the popular
social media app, stands accused by a whistleblower of running
an in-house CCP committee that had access to all the app's
data, including data stored in the U.S., contradicting the
company's past testimony at other Committees. This was all
according to a court filing.
Other sanctioned AI firms, such as iFlytek, SenseTime, and
Megvii have emerged as billion-dollar unicorns with the backing
of the Chinese state and the involvement of American venture
capital firms. In April, the Cyberspace Administration of
China, a very powerful body in the country, announced draft
regulations for generative AI as well. These draft rules would
require content produced by chatbots to follow, quote,
``socialist core values'' and avoid information that
undermines, quote, ``state unity.''
Given the CCP's enormous success at censorship so far, I
believe that it will once again succeed at coercing and
coopting Chinese and American technology firms. It will
transform generative AI into a tool of state oppression. We
must abandon the misguided idealism of working with AI
companies and government institutes in China.
As long as the CCP has any control over these technologies,
AI will not open the democratic discourse, and it will not
contribute to the betterment of humanity. China cannot be
trusted to help build the guardrails for AI, which is something
that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently proposed at a
Beijing conference on Friday. What should we do?
First, America should lead the way in building democratic
human rights first AI standards through United Nations bodies
and through the International Organization for Standardization,
or ISO. America must ensure that China's authoritarian agenda
does not influence global standards.
Second, we should stop American technologists from helping
China build its AI surveillance state, which many have been all
too eager to do. Sanctions and export controls are not enough.
This Subcommittee may consider drafting a bill that metes out
prison time for American executives who help develop any form
of AI in partnership with a Chinese entity that could have
authoritarian applications.
Third, we must strengthen our chip supply chains with our
allies to ensure that China doesn't get access to critical AI
logic chips. We should treat the CHIPS and Science Act as the
starting point and not the last step for this goal. We can
better coordinate with our partners, South Korea, Taiwan, and
Japan, by upgrading the Chip 4 talks now underway into a formal
R&D consortium.
As we enter the unprecedented age of generative AI, we must
not allow China, a one-party authoritarian state, to infect the
global ecosystem. We have seen the CCP's willingness to carry
out genocide against its people with the help of AI
surveillance systems. Now we must find ways to ensure that the
words ``never again'' hold true. Thank you, Senators, for
having me here today. I look forward to answering your
questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Cain appears as a submission
for the record.]
Chair Ossoff. Thank you, Mr. Cain, and thank you to all of
our panelists for your opening statements. Ms. DeStefano, every
parent in America can imagine the terror, the bone-chilling
experience that you had, but you went through it. What was it
like to hear a voice that you believed was your own
daughter's--that you believed was your own daughter's
expressing such distress?
Ms. DeStefano. It was the most horrified I've ever felt in
my life, second to actually being bedside to our youngest son,
who almost passed away from a rare disorder but luckily
survived. It took me back to that place where you're just
sitting there helpless. You don't know what to do. You don't
know what to do next, where to go. The pain, and the fear, and
the crying, and the sobbing, and the calling out for my help, I
can't put really into words how haunting that is, and how
haunting--it will probably last forever just because that's a
sound you never want to hear.
Chair Ossoff. And you were told by the authorities after
reporting this crime that had you wired money or sent money as
demanded they would investigate, but because no money was sent
there would be no further investigation. Correct?
Ms. DeStefano. Correct. Because there----
Chair Ossoff. And in fact----
Ms. DeStefano. I'm sorry, go ahead.
Chair Ossoff. Go ahead, please.
Ms. DeStefano. Correct. Exactly. Since no crime had been
committed there was nothing for them to pursue, or then, there
was no police report that they could take.
Chair Ossoff. In fact, my staff spoke with the Scottsdale
PD, and we asked about this and were told the same thing, that
because you hadn't transferred money, that there wasn't much to
be done in a criminal context.
We intend to look into that more deeply at existing wire
fraud statutes and other State or Federal statutes that may
create a criminal claim for precisely the circumstances you
raised. But I think it's clear, Senator Blackburn, Mr.
Chairman, that this conduct should be criminal and severely
punished. So you have my commitment to identify paths to
ensuring that families are protected from what you had to go
through.
Dr. Madry, you have specialized--and you're here in your
personal capacity. I want to emphasize this. But I think it's
important for the public to understand your credentials, a
substantial track record of research and leadership at MIT. You
will soon be joining the team at OpenAI. You're here in your
personal capacity. Based upon your experience, help the
Committee to understand other types of emergent scams, con
jobs, forms of fraud that can emerge similar to what Ms.
DeStefano experienced.
Dr. Madry. Thank you. And just for clarification, I
actually just recently joined OpenAI. So just to clarify this.
Chair Ossoff. Thank you.
Dr. Madry. So yes, what Mrs. DeStefano experienced is just
the beginning, not the end for sure. As I said essentially,
imagine you have this technology that can impersonate humans as
long as you don't have to see them, like, in the real life.
Imagine they are perfect copies. They can really deceive you.
Actually, they can be better at deceiving you than many humans
would be because they can pay attention to subtle cues in your
speech and kind of your cognitive biases.
So now imagine that someone can just master, you know,
thousands of copies of such agents, you know. What are the
possibilities? There is many. I go over many in my written
statement. You can field persuasion campaigns using that. You
can imagine that this is how we do advertising in the future.
It's actually quite scary if you start, you know, to use your
imagination.
Chair Ossoff. And in fact, just last week, Dr. Madry, the
FBI issued a warning that scammers are using AI to create fake
pornographic videos of victims using images and clips commonly
found on their social media accounts. And as the full Judiciary
Committee Chair Durbin and Senator Blackburn works through some
of the legislation that we are currently moving on, child sex
abuse material, this is an area that will require our study.
With my remaining time on this first round, Dr. Madry, I'd
like to address at the other end of the spectrum, not the daily
threats to safety, security but what many are discussing as the
emergence of potential existential threats through lowering the
cost of access to technologies that enable mass destruction,
like the development of bioweapons, or catastrophic
cybersecurity events, or even the emergence of properties of
these technologies not yet foreseeable that could place the
species at risk.
How much credence do you give these warnings? Do you think
they're overblown? Or do you think we need to be deeply, deeply
concerned about existential risk?
Dr. Madry. I think we should be seriously concerned
because, again, some of these, in particular the ones about
making it easier to build bioweapons or use them for better,
you know, breaching security, they are already here. So, like,
it's a theoretical possibility. So yes. So this is something we
should be worrying about right now.
Chair Ossoff. We'll get into that in more detail later.
Senator Blackburn.
Senator Blackburn. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all
for your testimony today. Ms. DeStefano, I cannot even imagine
what you went through during that period of time. But Mr.
Chairman and Chairman Durbin, I think this points out why we
need to look at online stalking, online harassment, and putting
some of the provisions in the online space that we have in the
physical space, because to be told there's nothing that can be
done after you experience this--so thank you for your words.
Mr. Cain, let me come to you. Having followed what has
happened in China, and I'm so interested in what you learned
from the former spies who built their surveillance network, I'm
grateful for the reporting that you've done on this. And what I
would like to know, and you may want to do this in writing for
me, which is fine, more details on the types of AI applications
that are being used to surveil citizens in China. And if it's
easier to put that in writing and submit it, that'll be fine. I
think it would be helpful information for us.
Mr. Cain: Yes, so I would be certainly eager to send you
something in writing, Senator Blackburn. I could also go over
some of that here if you have time for it.
Senator Blackburn. Go ahead. And I'd also like to know
who--what U.S. companies are sending technology to China that
they are using for this surveillance.
Mr. Cain. Certainly. So the Ministry of State Security
intelligence officers who had recently defected drew diagrams
for me. I have notebooks full of these diagrams. They show
where exactly the lines of power are drawn, and what they
revealed to me when it came to Uyghur populations and minority
populations in particular, that this was a highly centralized
system.
That all cameras, which cover nearly every square inch of
this region, are scooping up facial recognition data, voice
recognition data. They've also gathered biometrics on pretty
much everybody in the region. And this is all scooped up to the
Ministry of State Security in Beijing. This is the very top of
the heap. This goes straight up to Xi Jinping himself. This is
not something that anyone can argue is a local project or is
being done by local authorities. It is a national plan of
China's.
Senator Blackburn. So it's a plan, it's coordinated, it's
purposeful?
Mr. Cain. Yes, it's purposeful. And what they told me and
also they showed me WhatsApp messages--by the way, the Chinese
Security services use WhatsApp because even they don't trust
WeChat, the Chinese version, because they think they're getting
spied on. So they showed me WhatsApp messages with their spy
handlers in which they're being ordered to create a nationwide
project and in which the plans are to expand this globally into
other countries that might want these capabilities.
Senator Blackburn. Thank you. Ms. Givens, we don't have--
you mentioned privacy in your remarks. And of course, the EU
has GDPR. We have never been able to get a privacy standard on
the books.
And when you look at the development of AI, and you think
about things that need to be in place before we start down this
road and look at different applications, whether it's defense
or logistics or banking or healthcare or entertainment, like a
lot of my constituents in Tennessee. Logistics, healthcare,
entertainment, they're doing some good work there. But talk
about the impact of not having a national consumer privacy
standard. Talk about the impact that has on AI development.
Ms. Givens. The need for Federal privacy law in the United
States is overwhelming because of the real-world harms that are
happening to people now and because of the way that we're
seeding global leadership on these issues.
Just to draw a couple of examples, the way that our current
privacy regime exists which is a patchwork of State laws, some
sector-specific laws, relies on notice and choice. This
abstract idea that users can consent to their data being taken.
But we know because of the way that AI uses people's data that
that simply isn't the case. We are beyond a regime where users
actually opt in to any of these systems about how our
information is used on a daily basis.
So we have to have baseline rules of the road established
in a Federal law to limit the collection, sharing, and use of
people's private information. When we look at deepfake audio
and video, the source material for that is people's private
photos and audio recordings that have been shared and used at
scale.
You can also think in the advent of generative AI how much
information we share with a search bar in any given day. Now,
think about the private information people are going to be
sharing with a chatbot. How do we map over to make sure that
those are secure environments as well and that people can have
trust in these systems for them to develop?
The last example I'll give is in the use of AI when it's
used to discriminate against people in employment, lending, or
housing. All of that is powered by data driven inferences that
a privacy law could help address. And the final thing is that
some of the model privacy laws that have been introduced get at
these questions of algorithmic transparency and accountability.
So putting those two things together can be incredibly
powerful. So we're getting at root cause, the vast amount of
private information that is so widely available, and then also
dealing very specifically with these AI use cases as well.
Senator Blackburn. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chair Ossoff. Thank you, Senator Blackburn. Senator Durbin.
Chair Durbin. Thank you, Senator Ossoff. It's good to be
back in the Human Rights Subcommittee. You're doing a great job
on the Subcommittee. Interesting subject, artificial
intelligence. I have this hearing today and two different
briefings this afternoon.
And it's not unlike that for the last several weeks, two or
three different briefings a day. And for liberal arts lawyers
like myself I need them all to try to understand some of the
technical concepts that we are discussing, and more equally
important, impact that they're going to have on the lives of
Americans across the board.
We have several bills that we've considered before the
Senate Judiciary Committee which go to the subject of the
social media platforms, and any responsibility they have. The
interesting thing is we have five bills, all bipartisan bills,
Democrats and Republican sponsors, and they all passed this
Judiciary Committee unanimously. Unanimously. And the premise
behind them was the notion of responsibility on the part of the
social media platforms as to what they're posting.
Under Section 230 for the longest time they didn't pay much
attention to what was being posted. Now they're starting to pay
attention. And that's led to a very active discussion within
the ranks of Democrats and Republicans on the Hill about how
far we should go in holding them responsible or liable for
misconduct.
Ms. Reeve Givens, welcome back to the Senate Judiciary
Committee. We unanimously approved the STOP CSAM bill, a bill I
introduced to crack down on proliferation of child sexual abuse
materials online. Your organization, for some reason, opposed
the bill. One part of the bill your organization took
particular issue with is a provision that pierces Section 230
of the Communications Decency Act and allows CSAM victims to
sue platforms that host, store, or otherwise make this illegal
content available.
We had a classic example at a hearing. A young lady at the
age of 15 thought she discovered a true boyfriend on the
internet, was enticed to send sexually explicit videos and
photographs to this person who put them online. She's tried to
contact the social media platform that posted them. They
wouldn't get back to her. They wouldn't accept any
responsibility. They wouldn't remove them.
She's been going through this for 20 years now. She's
attempted suicide three times. She can't hold a job because
this person eventually, whoever is releasing it, finds her and
releases the information and the videos again to haunt her
along the way.
I heard echoes of your argument against the STOP CSAM Act
in a recent interview you gave to Bloomberg in discussing
potential liability of a platform like I've described, when a
generative AI tool causes harm. You noted that generative AI
tools, and I quote you now, ``do involve users engaging in
expressive conduct,'' end of quote. I'm not sure I understand
the expressive conduct of someone who's posting sexually
explicit videos of a child. And I also don't understand if it
would be expressive conduct when I listened to Ms. DeStefano's
experience.
It seems as though a company that releases a tool that can
clone a person's voice should be able to predict some of the
ways the tool would be misused. And if they don't put
sufficient safety measures in place, they should be held
legally accountable. That to me sounds just obvious. So I'm
worried about your phrase ``expressive conduct'' and your
opposition to our bill. Would you like to explain?
Ms. Givens. I would, Senator. I run an organization that
focuses on human rights and the impact of technology on regular
people around the world. So the issues that you're raising are
quite literally the hardest set of opposing tensions that we
deal with. And the reason we approach these questions the way
that we do is not by any means that we want to limit the
ability of victims like that to seek redress.
It's how we worry about the impact of those legislation
leading to platforms who have a profit motive and who act when
they're scared of liability to over-police other types of
conduct that are lawful and are expressive. So we worry about
the downstream effects of the heavy thumb of regulation. Now,
that doesn't mean by any measure that we want companies to turn
a blind eye to this or to be inactive. We believe in every
force of market pressure encouraging them to take those
responsibilities deeply and seriously.
Chair Durbin. What would you mean by market pressure?
Ms. Givens. So for example, the way that platforms now have
advertisers potentially threatening to pull their ads if they
don't think that they have responsible codes of conduct on
their platforms, if they're not enforcing that in meaningful
ways.
And my organization actively pushes those companies
ourselves to be responsible and thoughtful in how they're
acting, to be transparent in what they're doing, to be
consistent in their approaches. But there's the additional
hammer of legal liability. We worry about the long-term effects
of how that changes in platforms and leads to over-takedowns of
what could be expressive conduct in other settings.
Chair Durbin. See, you talk about the heavy thumb or
whatever of government. What we have now is not a heavy thumb.
We have a hands-off. We stand by the sidelines and watch this
poor victim, watch what happened to Ms. DeStefano. And to argue
that we are somehow suppressing the market, you know, perhaps
we are asking for responsibility, accountability in the market.
And if you made a decision to put a car on the road that was
really cheap and you were going to make money on it,
unfortunately if the brakes are awful, you pay a price for
that.
So the expression of the market took second place to the
safety of people driving the car and those around them. So I
just have to tell you, I disagree with your premise that the
market is more important than the individuals who are the
victims of it.
And I think that asking people to be held accountable for
what they have produced and what their actions result in is as
basic as justice in America. And to ignore that we are to say
Section 230 or something like it should continue and stop this
child sexual abuse and material online exploitation, I think it
goes way too far. Please, respond.
Ms. Givens. Thank you, Senator. Just to be clear, I'm not
worried about protecting the market in an abstract notion. I'm
worried about protecting other users who are posting lawful
content, but for whom automated content filtering and some of
the other provisions that companies would use if they were
worried about legal liability would lead to over-removals.
So for example, when we apply these types of mandates, if
companies suddenly get worried--and this has happened in the
instance of the SESTA/FOSTA bill that was passed by Congress
with very noble, understandable intentions to address the
scourge of sex trafficking online. We also now understand
analyzing those effects that sex workers have had a harder time
finding online spaces to find community and express their
concerns.
And that's been documented in terms of the effects. So
there is absolutely no questioning the intent of Congress and
the very real harms that you're trying to address. But I'm
saying that there are unintended consequences for other lawful
users in the ecosystem.
Chair Durbin. So the question is whether we accept the
premise that those who have these online platforms have any
responsibility to police content, particularly when we're
talking about child exploitation and trafficking. For God's
sake, there's got to be a line we can draw that protects the
marketplace but still doesn't exploit innocent people. Thank
you, Mr. Chairman.
Chair Ossoff. Thank you, Senator Durbin. Senator
Blumenthal.
Senator Blumenthal. Thank you. Thanks, Senator Ossoff, for
having this hearing. As one of the authors of the SESTA/FOSTA
bill, I happen to be very proud of it. And the consequences
that you've described for the sex workers have to be addressed.
But that's not a reason--to try to protect the victims of
trafficking, or the victims of CSAM, or the victims of
fentanyl, or the victims of a variety, of a plethora, of other
evils that the tech platforms know they are enabling and
propagating and empowering.
And as somebody who has written a variety of legislation
and enforced it, legislation can never be wholly good. We have
to accept that there will be other consequences, intended or
unintended, that we need to safeguard against. But let me just
come right to the point here.
We've had a number of hearings, one of them involving Sam
Altman. You referred to it, Mr. Cain. In that hearing and in
the subsequent hearing held in the Committee on Intellectual
Property and Copyright involving another four or five
witnesses, everybody agreed Section 230 does not apply to AI.
Do members of this panel disagree? And if so, please, speak up.
Dr. Madry. I do not necessarily agree or disagree.
Actually, I just don't know what is the answer here. Like, it's
very clear what's happening on the technical level. Now, how do
we interpret it from the legal perspective? Like, that's
something that is unclear to me.
Ms. Givens. So I also don't have a formal position on this.
I think it's going to be a--this is something courts are going
to have to figure out, and it's going to be a very fact-
specific inquiry. I think that the arguments for 230
protections often will not apply in generative AI systems by
any measure.
The goal that Section 230 is meant to promote is allowing
users to create and express themselves in an online
environment. And often what we're seeing with generative AI is
less about user expression, right? It's a user putting in a
query for medical advice, and that's very likely just the
company spewing something back as opposed to something that the
user is actually generating or creating.
So I think there is--and Senator Wyden has been clear about
this as well. It is a very different fact pattern than what 230
was generated for. The one exception that I think of is when an
individual, for example, might use an image generating tool for
their own expressive purposes. It's them that's using that tool
in a particular manner. That's where I think there's just a
little bit of a question of where the facts will go and we need
to think that through.
Senator Blumenthal. So how would you enforce Section 230?
What, by deepfake? By impersonation? I'm not sure I understand.
Ms. Givens. Oh, no. I'm sorry, Senator. To be clear, there
are different factual scenarios for how generative AI might be
used and where the line of liability should fall. There are the
developers of the AI tool, there are the deployers of the
generative AI tool, and then there are users. And they're all
making different choices that might trigger different types of
liability.
Senator Blumenthal. But what about the platforms?
Ms. Givens. So it depends what we're counting as the
platform in this instant, right? So for example, a generative
AI tool that would not typically fall in the bucket of 230 by
any measure. So the point that I'm making is that there are
moments when it is actually going to be the end user that is
making that tool do something intentionally bad. And my
instinct here is that the user should be the one who is mainly
responsible for what they are doing.
Senator Blumenthal. Well, my takeaway from this panel is
that we need to clarify Section 230 to say it doesn't apply to
AI. Because if it does, we're in a whole new world of hurt.
Ms. Givens. I do think that there's an awful lot that
courts will be able to figure out just through this simple
question of where is aiding and abetting liability. The simple,
the straightforward shield if you can't litigate it that 230
provides, I agree that that very unlikely applies to generative
AI tools at all.
Instead, I think you are allowed to pierce through and then
you get into the question of who's doing the conduct where. And
I think that's where there's going to be a really fruitful
discussion of where you apportion that liability and the
responsibility that we want for the platforms for the
generative AI tools to make sure they can't be misused.
Senator Blumenthal. Yes, I'm not willing to let the courts
legislate. I think we have a responsibility to legislate. And
we have a responsibility to protect people who may be victims,
and we're moving in that direction. We're also working on
legislation that would establish an oversight agency, some
independent entity that would set common-sense rules, and a
licensing regime for certain uses of AI, not to discourage any
form of free expression either through that legislation or
through any rewriting of Section 230.
We want to encourage innovation and startups in AI the same
way that Google and Facebook were able to take on the IBMs of
the world, the great giants, through their innovation. And we
want to support and encourage people who are doing it in their
garages, startups.
But we also want to avoid repeating the mistakes that we've
done through social media, which literally got halfway around
the world, as Mark Twain used to say about lies, before the
Congress got out of bed. And we're still trying to make up for
lost time there through the Kids Online Safety Act and other
measures.
Basic rules of the road can be a sustainable foundation on
how we move ahead with AI. So I would be interested--my time is
up here, but any of your written comments on these kinds of
proposals would be greatly welcome as we go forward. Thanks,
Mr. Chairman.
Chair Ossoff. Thank you, Senator Blumenthal. And Ms.
Givens, I think that this discussion about who has liability is
essential as we discuss potential regulation and how issues
that arise from this technology may be treated in the courts.
Let's discuss that in a civil rights and criminal justice
context.
As you noted in your opening statement, there was recently
a man, Mr. Reid in Atlanta, Georgia, who was arrested and held
in jail for 6 days on suspicion of a crime committed in a
different State because of a false match through facial
recognition technology. So let's just begin by acknowledging
for the record, Ms. Givens, these tools and technologies are
hardly foolproof. Correct?
Ms. Givens. That is absolutely right. And we are seeing the
errors in those systems deeply impact people's lives today.
Chair Ossoff. There are a whole range of applications in
the criminal justice context that raise troubling questions.
Let's focus on this facial recognition question for the moment,
and let's discuss a hypothetical.
If a police department uses an AI-driven facial recognition
tool and makes an arrest, or perhaps the prosecutor brings a
charge on the basis of a match using that tool, and it turns
out that the arrested or charged individual is innocent, and a
study reveals that the underlying facial recognition tool has
ingrained in it some racial bias, or is less accurate in
matching Black faces than white faces, and a civil rights claim
is brought against the department or against the DA's office,
where might the liability rest?
Is it with the department, the prosecutor who used the
tool? Is it with the producer of the tool? Is it with the AI
model that the producer of the tool licensed? Is it with
whoever curated the data that trained the AI model? Your take,
please.
Ms. Givens. So sadly, that's not a hypothetical. We've seen
that these systems do have statistically significant
differences, particularly for people of darker skin. When we
look at the few examples that we know in public record of
misidentifications, those are all Black men so far that have
been wrongly arrested. And that's only the tip of the iceberg
because right now people don't know when it's an AI tool, when
it's face recognition that's being used to just generate their
arrest.
So there's a huge information asymmetry here where people
don't even know that they are the subjects of these tools. And
that's the case with face recognition. But also, many of the AI
decisionmaking tools that we could also talk about today,
whether it's in housing, lending, employment.
I do think without question, the responsibility first and
foremost lies with law enforcement in the case of face
recognition technology. If you are going to be making an
arrest, you need to make sure that you are doing so under the
Constitution on a reasonable basis, and you need to be
complying with all of your constitutional obligations in that
setting.
And right now, the accuracy concerns of face recognition
raise that issue, but also other concerns as well with how the
use of face recognition impinges on people's ability to express
themselves, to move freely through society without thinking
that they are being surveilled.
So the primary responsibility lies there, and it's not
going to see action until Congress steps in to legislate. We're
seeing some States and local governments step in to limit the
use of face recognition by law enforcement. But we need
Congress to act to make clear what the obligations are and to
mandate, for example, that a warrant is required in those
circumstances.
Chair Ossoff. Let's take a case that is emerging and will
likely emerge more frequently when we think about the
predictive uses of this technology. How vast data sets, much of
it foraged from public domain, or of course in the case of
Federal or State or local agencies from law enforcement
databases or data sets that they may purchase to which they
license access, being aggregated, analyzed to train models that
make predictions about risk of criminal activity geographically
or even at an individual level.
Let's just take an example where such a model is trained
based upon public domain and open-source information, or such
predictions might be made using open-source and publicly
available information. Is there some point at which that
becomes itself a form of search by the state?
Ms. Givens. Those methods raise very deep questions as to
what could amount to probable cause. The types of examples that
you're talking about here come up, for instance, where law
enforcement is doing social media analysis to try and indicate
who might be culpable of a crime to look at those types of data
points, or as you mentioned, to do inference analysis.
And all of them--both raise real questions about the
accuracy and the likelihood of what they are generating really
being a legitimate foundation for law enforcement action.
They also raise--their simple use raise real questions for
our democracy when we look at the vast amount of data that is
being collected.
Again, going back to this question of commercial data
privacy practices, these are people's Facebook profiles, and
the images that they've shared of themselves, and what they
think of as private settings now giving rise to law enforcement
uses. Law enforcement can purchase data about people from a
data broker and use that for their investigation, not having to
go through any of the traditional law enforcement requirements
for a search.
So what we are seeing is the proliferation of data creating
these mechanisms for law enforcement to be able to circumvent
their legal obligations, and that's something we need to
fundamentally worry about as well.
Chair Ossoff. Let's think about it in the context of fair
housing laws or laws and precedent that establish parameters
for access to public facilities. Of course, technology is
emerging and will be used by property owners to screen
applicants for tenancy embedded within which may be racial
bias, which on its face would violate fair housing laws. How
are you seeing these threats to civil liberties and consumer
rights emerging, and how should Congress be thinking about
responding?
Ms. Givens. So sadly, that is also not a hypothetical.
Those are harms that we're seeing right now. I can give two
specific instances.
One is a growing number of landlords who are using face
recognition technology, ostensibly for security purposes on
their campuses. But actually, what they are doing is also being
able to identify somebody who is in arrears on their rent, for
example, and being able to identify them in that way instead.
So this is surveillance capabilities for security being instead
misused in a way that impinges on people's fundamental freedoms
to go in and out of their home.
The other area, as you mentioned, is in access to housing.
We also see this in access to jobs and access to credit and
lending. Increasingly, we are seeing private sector tools that
draw together inferences and data points about people.
For example, their education, history, whether or not
they've ever had an arrest record against them, what their
credit score is, whether or not they've ever been in default on
something, and compiling all of those to see if somebody is
suitable and eligible as a tenant or as an employee or for a
particular setting of credit.
Evidence shows that those often are not good predictors,
and they're not fair predictors of whether or not somebody
should be able to have, you know, access to an apartment.
We know for example that education records, if you look at
that, and arrest records in our country skew demographically
against historically marginalized communities. And so when
we're looking at that versus much more objective data, like,
``Have you paid your utility bills on time the past couple of
months,'' we're ingraining metrics and values that can really
entrench and deepen inequality.
And right now, there is no oversight of this. There's no
requirement to be transparent about it that's meaningfully
enforced, which is why it's important that Federal agencies,
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is doing work on this,
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is doing work on
this, Congress could also be using its oversight powers to look
at the existing civil rights protections that we have, see how
well they're rising to this moment, and then fill in the gaps
to make sure people are really protected.
Chair Ossoff. Thank you, Ms. Givens. Dr. Madry, would you
say that the rate at which this technology is growing in
capability is linear or exponential? And how do you foresee
that trend developing over time?
Dr. Madry. So definitely, if you look at the past 10 years,
I would say, exponential. In a sense there are things that 10
years ago seemed like a complete science fiction to me that now
are just reality. Of course, you know, it's hard to make
predictions especially about the future, but again, if the last
10 years tell us anything, we should expect quite a lot of, you
know, rapid developments ahead of us. But, of course, only time
will tell.
Chair Ossoff. To protect against risk, for example, of
manipulation of biolabs or attacks on nuclear sites and
critical infrastructure, is your view that emphasis at this
time should be on guardrails embedded in the AI systems
themselves, or on defensive technology and innovation in
cybersecurity?
Dr. Madry. Well, the answer should be both because
essentially, like, I think the U.S. Government should really
get its hands dirty and actually develop AI themselves. And
that would be on the defensive part. But yes, the guardrails
are definitely something to think about. We should just keep in
mind that we can only put the guardrails on things that we
control, so essentially things that are developed by law-
abiding U.S. or other international companies. But yes, like,
we should do both.
Chair Ossoff. Things that we can control and things within
our jurisdiction. Mr. Cain, you suggested in your opening
remarks the need for international organizations, whether the
U.N. or ISO, to be engaged to develop global standards. Talk a
bit more about your vision for that and how you might see it
working.
Mr. Cain. Yes, so thank you, Senator. The ISO has already
passed a number of global standards and also the UNESCO. So the
United Nations Science and Education Organization has also done
its own standards.
One of the problems with what's been passed so far is that
they have allowed China to make these moves that sound that--as
if they are public relations moves.
So in 2021, there was one standard passed out at UNESCO,
and later that year the Chinese government said that it was
going to drop using AI for its social credit systems in China
to follow these particular standards. But I have sources in
many of these Chinese firms that develop social credit, and
they tell me that AI is still being used just wildly without
any guardrails whatsoever. There's little that that particular
international standard did.
So my vision would be something that is more enforceable
under the law, something that would be required for U.N. member
states to actually enforce or to create legislation, you know,
within each member state. So something similar to the
International Criminal Court or the European Union.
Now, you know, I do know that this is not something that
could happen overnight, but with the extent of the technology
that we're now dealing with I think this might be the only way
to ensure that bad actors like China or even Russia or others
can't, you know, trample over the international order.
Chair Ossoff. Ms. Givens, your perspective please on
international law and artificial intelligence.
Ms. Givens. So I think we absolutely need international
cooperation. Number one, these tools are used across borders.
They impact people across borders. And number two, I think the
values that we bring to that conversation, to Mr. Cain's point,
are deeply important, and the U.S. needs to be in these spaces.
There are areas where that's happening now, but we should
think more about that, how that's integrated with the domestic
agenda. So, for example, the U.S. and the EU Trade and
Technology Council is an ongoing cooperative effort between the
U.S. and the European Union to have alignment as they think
about the governance of AI, and in particular, to develop a
shared vocabulary around how AI systems work and where
regulatory interventions can fit in, and to talk about what
standards for safety and mitigating some of the harms we're
talking about online look like.
So I think that's a really important example of how
cooperation can happen. There's another instance, though, where
we need to be careful of international agreements actually
undermining our efforts to regulate these spaces at home. So,
for example, right now a number of advocacy organizations and
Members of Congress have spoken out to warn the administration
that in a trade agreement that has intellectual property
protections, for example, you don't inadvertently undermine
domestic efforts to demand transparency of AI systems.
So I raise that because it's an important example of how
international and domestic conversations need to sync up with
one another, and we need to make sure that we are able to
project our vision of democratic governance and human rights in
these settings around the world.
Chair Ossoff. Thank you, Ms. Givens. Senator Blackburn.
Senator Blackburn. Thank you. Mr. Cain, I wanted to come
back to you on the second part of my initial question to you
about what technologies, what U.S. companies may be sending
technology to China and the CCP that they could use. And do you
know of any American companies that were involved in creating
or funding AI tech that was used to surveil citizens in China?
Mr. Cain. Yes. One of the greatest perpetrators of what you
are saying is Microsoft. Microsoft has run an AI laboratory in
Beijing since the late 1990s. It's called Microsoft Research
Asia. This is the laboratory that went on for two decades to
train many of the top AI technologists and developers in China,
many of whom went on to now-sanctioned firms, such as
SenseTime, Megvii and--I'm sorry, the last firm escapes me at
the moment, but major, major multibillion-dollar firms.
Some of these individuals are now sanctioned in addition to
their companies. And they were directly involved in creating
the facial recognition and the voice recognition technologies
that were sold directly to Chinese authorities, to the Defense
Ministry, to the Public Security Bureau, and to the State
Security Bureau. Microsoft has created itself at the core of
the Chinese AI ecosystem.
And even just--I have an article here in the Financial
Times just reported just this week. So Microsoft will be moving
many of the AI developers from this laboratory to Vancouver
because according to the article, there have been many internal
discussions about the problematic nature of what has been
happening over there. That they're getting tangled up in just a
really bad situation and they need to separate these
operations.
Senator Blackburn. Okay. And then you mentioned TikTok and
ByteDance in your testimony. So touch on how you've witnessed
the CCP use TikTok and ByteDance to help build out their
surveillance state.
Mr. Cain. Yes. ByteDance is--you know, here in America we
know TikTok as the social media app with the dancing videos and
the cat videos. In China, ByteDance was directly involved in
working with the Ministry of Public Security to spread
propaganda about the Uyghur genocide and about the atrocities
against human rights there. This was a formal contract. This
was set up. It was a formal relationship. It did not happen
under the radar. It's something that ByteDance was directly
involved in.
And, you know, personally I find it a bit ludicrous that a
company that's involved in a genocide overseas can operate so
openly in America. I think that's a gross, just horrific, you
know, just a failure to uphold basic principles of rule of law
and human rights and democracy here. And for that reason, I
think TikTok should be severely restricted on U.S. soil.
Senator Blackburn. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
Chair Ossoff. Dr. Madry, in some ways there's a tension
between what we've thought of traditionally in the AI space
training models to recognize certain patterns and images and to
make predictions and on the generative side, the production of
images, video, audio.
And there's the potential for the pattern recognition
capabilities of AI models to be a countermeasure against the
production of counterfeit, inauthentic content such as what
terrorized Ms. DeStefano. Which capability is advancing more
rapidly? The ability to detect what is fake or the ability to
produce it? And is that something inherent technically or does
that just reflect where the R&D money is going right now?
Dr. Madry. That's an excellent question. So in general,
indeed, there is this kind of complementarity of, you know,
recognizing if something is fake or not versus being able to
generate something that can pass as being real or not.
And in some sense, like, the unfortunate dynamics here is
that if I have a good detector of a fake content I can turn,
there is a technical reason for that, it into a even better
generator of bad content. So what we are essentially, like,
facing here is this kind of cat-and-mouse game in which kind of
we really want to be ahead on the right side.
And this brings me to the other point you mentioned, is the
funding and incentives. Currently, I do not see that much
incentives being provided for the detection of the deepfake.
Like, as far as I know, I'm sure some of the companies are
doing something, but in the research space definitely more
activities on generation than on detection. Which makes sense
because that's what research is about. But I would love if the
Government provided, in some way, some incentives to much, much
more work on the detection side.
Mr. Ossoff. Ms. Givens.
Ms. Givens. I think that's absolutely right. We need
extensive and quick research into deepfake detection technology
and good ways to help authenticate content so that it can be
trusted in how to make that as effective as possible. I do
think there are also ways to strongly incentivize the companies
to play their part in doing this. And a large part of that is
going to be about how existing law maps onto this.
We got into a conversation about Section 230, but unlike in
the 230 context, if a generative AI tool is quite literally
being used to generate a falsified image, or is allowing
somebody to create child exploitation material, that's the
company's own tool that is doing that specific thing and
surfacing that as a result. And so that's where we may well see
litigation for defamation or for other things surface onto
those companies themselves.
So this is an area, and I talked about this in my
testimony, where I think Congress can and should pay very close
attention to whether existing laws are helping address these,
how the liability is falling, help shape that conversation, and
use that in addition to some of the market pressure and
government pressure that's being on the companies right now, to
step up on some of these questions of how their tools are being
used and the content that they might generate.
And I think the combination of those two things, it's not a
silver bullet but that gets us at least much further than where
we are now on helping to address these types of concerns.
Chair Ossoff. Dr. Madry.
Dr. Madry. I just wanted to add one related piece to that,
is that in some sense whenever the company that is, like, whose
tools, like, is providing this AI, is developing this AI, if
they cooperate they can actually give us a home field advantage
in this combat because they can provide some watermarking or
some other capabilities to make it easier to detect that this
is a fake content.
Again, this is still all proof-of-concept prototypes right
now, but it would be great to have incentives as much more work
in this space. But the point is that we can kind of make it a
bit easier for us to detect it if we have the cooperation of
the industry here.
Chair Ossoff. Ms. Givens, what kinds of First Amendment
concerns arise?
Ms. Givens. So as I mentioned in my opening testimony,
there are very good, lawful, legitimate reasons why people
might want to manipulate images. Right? There's parody, there's
my kids messing around to see what images they can create on
these tools for fun as an experiment. We've seen researchers,
for example, transform photos of American cities to show what
they would have looked like had they been subject to the
extensive bombing that happened in Syria as a way of public
education.
These are all good reasons why generative images and
manipulated images might have useful purposes and should be
treated as a form of expressive conduct. So the tricky question
comes in on how we incentivize the companies to address harmful
misuses of that technology and put in the safety guards that
they can to address that.
For example, there are some companies already that say
images of political figures running for public office simply
cannot be manipulated on their platforms. The technology
doesn't allow it so that they do not contribute to election
related deepfakes.
There are things that companies can do, but how we create
that balance between what the companies are choosing for their
content policies in a way that promotes safety but also allows
parity in the expressive activities that our Constitution
protects and that as a society we will want to foster, that is
the challenge before us right now on how we balance those two
issues.
Chair Ossoff. Dr. Madry which emergent capabilities or
capabilities that are here today most excite you?
Dr. Madry. Excite me? That's an interesting choice of the
word.
Chair Ossoff. Or if you're not excitable, which do you
believe have the greatest potential to support and promote
human flourishing, human health, human well-being, and human
freedom?
Dr. Madry. Okay, so that's different because we were
talking about all the bad users. So I'm not excited about any
of them, but I'm definitely very excited about many of the
potential outcomes. To me, the biggest vision that I have of
positive vision about AI, and hopefully it's relatively close,
is essentially having this personal tutor, personal kind of,
like, essentially tutor who understands us, understands our
learning deficiencies if we have them, understanding how we
learn, and helping us learn about different issues.
So essentially you can use generative AI to kind of help
you kind of look at the solutions to your problems and seeing,
you know, what mistakes you are making, explaining these
mistakes and so on. So we are seeing some early work on this.
In particular, Khan Academy is working on such technology and
I'm extremely excited about the impact it would have on the
humanity if this kind of really high-quality education could be
available to everyone at minimal and ideally no cost.
Chair Ossoff. And Ms. Givens, we'll give everyone the
opportunity to say what they're most potentially enthusiastic
about. But I just want to--because this question on education
it raises, I'm afraid to say, Dr. Madry, a question about risk.
You know, when we think about the way that we sort
children, the way that standardized testing regimes function to
sort young people toward careers, toward educational
opportunities, the capacity to make judgments about human
potential on the basis of data that to this point was not
intelligible is vast.
The potential to use it for good, to provide personalized
educational experiences that meet special needs is vast. But
so, too, is the potential for this to constrain human freedom
and to determine the choices and futures available to a human
being from a very young age. Ms. Givens, how should we be
thinking about regulation or best practices or standards in
education?
Ms. Givens. The way you phrase it is so beautifully put.
This is a privacy issue. My goodness. The type of interaction
that we have with those systems, all of that potential--and
there is so much--if that is also used to profile you, to say
what learning differences you have as you're going through an
experience, if we don't have strong Federal privacy regulation,
anybody could get their hand on that data and the company could
just bury it somewhere deep in their terms of service, and you
wouldn't even know when you start using that tool.
So this is why we need rules of the road. We need rules of
the road for privacy. We need rules of the road for how people
can use this information and for people to be able to sue and
bring a cause of action if they are being discriminated against
based on this type of information, for example.
And then, of course, you mentioned the need for responsible
design. So there's legal liability but even absent individuals
vindicating their rights. We also need to make sure that
companies are coming into this with a mindset of safety.
And that's where entities in particular working in the
education space have to be committed to equity and serving the
person first, making sure that what they're doing is
accommodating people's needs in learning, but not triaging the
top students from the bottom and leaving the bottom just to
keep circulating in that ever-reinforcing pattern.
That's where questions--it's going to be hard for Congress
to very specifically mandate exactly how those tools should
work. But that's where general-purpose legislation like
algorithmic accountability, mandating transparency, mandating
risk assessments for what types of harms might result from an
algorithmic system, and having companies have to disclose how
they're addressing those harms, that's how policymakers and
regulators would be able to understand the risks of those tools
and take action against them when they're harming people.
Chair Ossoff. Ms. DeStefano, in many ways your family's
story sets the tone for this hearing. And you have opened many
eyes across the Nation to the kind of horrifying risk that
Americans face from the abuse and misuse of this technology.
And I'm grateful to you for coming and sharing your story with
us. Before we close the hearing, are there any final
reflections or comments that you'd like to make?
Ms. DeStefano. What I experienced was horrible. It was one
of the worst 4 minutes of my life. That being said, that
doesn't mean that all AI is obviously evil. Listening to a lot
of different areas that it can be used for good is really
inspiring. We have a young son with a genetic disorder, and my
daughter, Aubrey, we also spoke about, went through speech
therapy for 6 years.
The advancements and accessibility that AI can help these
children grow and overcome disabilities is incredible. It was
very difficult for us. That's why I knew what an unknown number
would often mean, a doctor's office or hospital, through
personal experience. It was very difficult to be able to get
her or both of them into developmental pediatrics and speech
pathology, etc., to help them improve and overcome their
disabilities.
So I think AI, by allowing education or accessibility to
certain types of specialized medicine and specialized care,
that can be really beneficial. So I don't want to speak
horribly negative about AI. What happened to me with my
daughter was the tragic side of AI. But in the other sense,
too, there's a lot of hopeful advancements that AI will do to
improve life as well, so.
Chair Ossoff. Thank you. Ms. DeStefano. And Dr. Madry, both
Mr. Cain and Ms. Givens weighed in on international law,
international agreements, potential for the need for there to
be an international regulatory agency. Your view on that as a
scientist, engineer, and technologist, what is it that would
require inspection? What are the standards, or thresholds, or
capabilities that such an entity would regulate?
Dr. Madry. Well, essentially, usually--first of all, I
think we will only be learning what it is that we should be
looking for. So that's where you want to have this structure
and agency in place that has close touch and is paying
attention to how things develop. If you ask me about the
capability threshold, I would put it essentially roughly at the
state-of-the-art right now. And then as we see how technology
develops which again we could be able to keep close track of,
and what are the new risks, we might either lower it or make it
higher.
But yes, I would just want to understand exactly how is
this AI used, for which purposes, to what extent can we
mitigate certain bad users of this, and essentially also
understand where we as the whole world, not only the U.S., are
in terms of, you know, emerging AI capabilities. So if there is
some threshold to be exceeded, well, we want to know it sooner
than later.
Chair Ossoff. Ms. Givens, what actions must Congress take
to stay on the critical path toward ensuring that the emergence
of this technology facilitates human flourishing and human
freedom rather than enabling the abuse of power?
Ms. Givens. Congress needs to look at specific use cases,
like the face recognition example that I gave, which probably
requires specific legislation to address those harms. But then
there's an across-the-board effort that Congress could make as
well, which is to get to this question of mandating
transparency and mandating disclosures of how companies are
looking at questions of safety, validity, their fitness for
purpose, whether they discriminate, whether they violate
people's privacy.
We need to establish that as the baseline analysis for any
company whose tool could have a high-risk use to go through
that process, and to do it not just internally but to publicly
disclose how they're thinking about those risks and what they
are doing to mitigate those risks. We can't have accountability
without that baseline rule of the road because we literally
don't know how the harms are going to manifest, and we can't
just have individuals trying to fight this David versus Goliath
battle.
So if we talk about algorithmic accountability, Congress
can step in there in a meaningful way to try and really start
that conversation, and then have ongoing oversight of how well
our civil rights laws and product liability laws are rising to
the occasion as well. So I think there's steps Congress can
take now, like legislating around algorithmic accountability,
and then there's oversight power that Congress can have, too,
of how the sector continues to evolve.
And above all, I think one of the big pieces--somebody
mentioned earlier that they're not a technologist. Senator
Durbin said that. We need non-technologists to feel they have a
seat at the table. We need public voices to have a seat in
these conversations. So right now, governments around the world
are talking to some of the largest companies about the safety
standards they're going to adopt, and that's good.
But there's a role for Congress to help make that a much
more public conversation, where civil society advocates and
regular people have a seat at the table as well. And that's
another area where Congress can use its oversight authorities
now to help drive that conversation forward quickly but in a
meaningful way.
Chair Ossoff. I want to thank all of our witnesses for
appearing today and for helping us work through these
questions. I thank my colleagues who attended for a productive
discussion.
After what we've heard today about the risks and the
opportunities, it is clear that the Senate must continue and
accelerate our study of machine learning, of artificial
intelligence, and Ms. Givens, to the point you made and Senator
Blackburn made, get our act together on a national privacy law.
Without national privacy legislation, our efforts to control
the abuse of these technologies are substantially reduced. And
so that is an urgent task for the U.S. Congress.
The hearing record will remain open for 1 week for
statements to be submitted into the record. Questions for the
record may be submitted by Senators by 5 p.m. on Tuesday, June
21st. The hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:11 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
[Additional material submitted for the record follows.]
A P P E N D I X
Additional Material Submitted for the Record
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]