A sexual deepfake bill was signed into law in South Dakota, and additional deepfake bills passed the full legislature in New Mexico and made it through their chambers of origin in South Dakota, Utah, and Wisconsin. Plus, we saw new AI executive orders in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. But this week we’re going to focus our analysis on an important bill recently introduced in California, which might be the most comprehensive piece of state AI legislation to date.

“Impact assessments” have been a key reporting requirement of many comprehensive AI bills that lawmakers have introduced this year. They are one of the safeguards being put in place to help combat disparate treatment and discriminatory outcomes from the use of AI tools in hiring, education, and other settings. Like mandatory disclosures, impact assessments are another early tool policymakers are using to regulate AI as the technology becomes an increasingly common aspect of our daily lives.

Much of our AI coverage has focused on potential regulation of the new technology, but policymakers are also seeking to harness the power of AI to improve the lives of their residents. No state wants to be left behind in what could be a revolutionary change to workforce, education, and government. Accordingly, governors and lawmakers have proposed ways to attract AI business and ready their state’s workforce for a new AI world.

States have largely focused on regulating specific instances of AI use (e.g., sexual or political deepfakes) and largely held off on a more comprehensive regulatory action last year. The closest we’ve seen is the draft automated decision-making regulations in California that were sent back to the drawing board. But after studying the issue closely, lawmakers are prepared to expand the legislative debate in 2024 and take aim at AI more broadly, taking inspiration from President Biden’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.

Policymakers face a tough challenge when it comes to regulating the fast-moving AI industry. However, disclosure requirements are one tool policymakers have embraced. By mandating that you must disclose when you’ve used AI to generate media or an AI tool, policymakers thread the needle of providing useful information to consumers while not placing a substantial roadblock in front of the nascent industry’s development. Recent reports of low-quality, AI-generated books and articles flooding the market highlight the importance of disclosures.

The flip side of AI technology’s economy-boosting potential is the assumption that if AI succeeds as currently imagined, it’ll replace much of today’s workforce. Unsurprisingly, this is a major concern for state lawmakers and their constituents. Policymakers are again placed in the difficult position of balancing protections for individual workforces against the economic productivity gains promised by AI. So far, state lawmakers have proposed several strategies to address this issue.

The arrival of generative AI tools last year brought incredible possibilities but it also raised concerns about the potential impact of the new technology. The public and experts think regulations will be necessary. And policymakers have vowed to take quick regulatory action to ensure they will not fall behind the rapidly accelerating technology as they did with data privacy regulation. What can we expect from state AI policy in 2024?

Despite all the promise and benefits of AI technology, we’re already seeing some of the real-world, negative impacts as AI is used to produce nonconsensual, sexual deepfake images and videos showing real individuals depicted in a sexually explicit manner. These images often contain the face of an actual person on a naked or partially clothed body that is not their own and disproportionately targets women. Along with deepfakes aimed at electoral candidates, states are moving quickly to combat the alarming proliferation of nonconsensual sexual deepfakes.

Even with recent and highly anticipated releases, AI itself is not all that new, and policymakers have addressed AI use cases long before ChatGPT burst on the scene a year ago. ago. One example is facial recognition technology — something that policymakers quickly became skeptical of, especially when used on the public without consent. States initially moved forward but eventually backtracked on broadly banning facial recognition use by law enforcement. However, the leader in regulating how technology like facial recognition is used is Illinois.

On November 27, 2023, the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) released a draft text of regulations related to businesses' use of “automated decision making technology.” The draft regulations, if adopted, would establish a framework for how businesses can implement automated decision making technology that uses personal information to make a decision or acts as a replacement for human decision making. A key issue that the CPPA draft regulations address is when a consumer can and cannot opt-out of a business’ use of this technology.

Last week, important odd-year elections were held in a handful of states, which means we’re officially in the 2024 presidential election cycle. As lawmakers contemplate their reelection campaigns, a direct concern of theirs, a concern shared by industry leaders, is AI’s use to influence 2024 election results. AI, in the form of “deepfake” images, audio, and video could be used to manipulate images and recordings to change a candidate’s speech into something they didn’t say, alter a candidate's movement in an embarrassing manner, or doctor images to perpetuate false narratives.

In total, state lawmakers have introduced over 160 bills related to AI this year. Notably, the vast majority of this legislation failed to move past the committee stage of the legislative process. While a few of these bills focused on generative AI models, many of these were intended to bring more attention to the emerging issue. Most of the bills considered this year can be organized into six categories: Facial Recognition Technology, Protections Against Biases, Deepfakes, Social Media Regulation, AI Use in Government, and Study Groups.

We’ve established that artificial intelligence is the issue du jour in state capitols today and that state lawmakers are solidly in the education stage of the policymaking process around AI regulation. But it’s helpful to take a step back and ask what are we even talking about? What is “artificial intelligence”? Policymakers and industry insiders have yet to settle on a universal definition, and lawmakers need a more precise and narrow definition of AI in order to regulate the technology in legislation. So far, states have proposed various definitions.

From a public policy standpoint, we’re solidly in the education phase of AI regulation. We’re all scrambling to get up to speed on this emerging technology. For policymakers, this means study committees, task forces, and working groups dedicated to hearing from experts and stakeholders with the goal of developing recommendations on how best to regulate AI at this stage in the technology’s development. And that’s largely what we’ve seen this year as lawmakers gear up for a busy 2024 legislative session. Eight states have created a dedicated group tasked with studying AI, while another 11 states have asked a standing committee or state agency to take the lead in studying this emerging technology.