Republicans are in a victorious mood. In his first week in office, Donald Trump has issued an executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives from the federal government, cancelled grants to censor “disinformation”, and repealed Joe Biden’s executive order on AI safety regulation.
But while things look promising at the federal level, there are a series of state bills in progress which could force AI to subscribe to DEI policies. The most important of these is happening in Texas. Many top tech companies have moved from Silicon Valley to the Lone Star State in pursuit of freedom and less regulation, but this could be undermined by the Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (TRAIGA). “As we celebrate in DC, Texas is about to hand its AI industry to Biden bureaucrats and Big Tech,” said Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, adding that TRAIGA “would kill innovation, jobs, and let China win”.
It is not only innovation, however, that will suffer; this could also usher in a new age of censorship. The Biden administration’s legislation promoted “equity in AI” and has funded groups which are now pushing to enact “disparate impact” laws. These laws are designed to safeguard against “unintended discrimination” when AI makes decisions about or relating to employees.
Disparate impact is the idea that legally protected categories of people can suffer more than others from rules or legislation that, on the surface, appear neutral. Essentially, the same rules leading to different outcomes is an example of disparate impact which, in most cases, people assume is evidence of racism. But AI, in thrall to progressive nostrums, has ended up in ridiculous places by trying to get rid of possible disparate impacts. So much so that Google Gemini last year generated misleading images of black Nazis and Native American female Founding Fathers. Its AI model, which was specifically trained to comply with Biden’s executive order, racially balanced all images, so as to avoid different outcomes between protected groups.
What is strange about this Texas AI bill, which would undermine Trump’s moves at the federal level, is that it was tabled by Republican State Representative Giovanni Capriglione. It is less strange, though, when it is known that the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF), a think tank that received several government grants during the Biden administration, hosts a working group coordinating these bills with Capriglione on its steering committee. It received $1 million from the State Department, $500,000 from the National Science Foundation, and $200,000 from the Department of Energy. FPF operates a working group dominated by Democrats, trying to pass the same bill in Republican-led states. Until Thursday, its website read that it “intended to advance the National Strategy and [Biden] EO on AI” and “promote equity”. The website removed these phrases later that day.
TRAIGA is one of over 10 state bills introduced by members of FPF’s working group, though FPF’s CEO now denies drafting or supporting it. These bills, which are almost identical, would put the burden on all AI users — which they call “deployers” — to avoid disparate impact “harms” in large parts of the economy. Those working in education, hiring, finance, government, healthcare, law, and numerous other industries would be regulated by these proposed laws. Some versions of the bill, including the Texas one, would also create a new regulatory agency to enforce these laws. It would enable bureaucrats to set arbitrary guidelines for what users must comply with. In either case, both these bills would create a new complex of AI censorship and compliance, similar to the social media censorship Trump is now working to reduce.
Republicans need to remember that the Biden administration spent four years building up powerful networks across the country to continue pushing DEI and censorship. While Republicans may have won the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, Biden’s machinery continues to operate in many state Houses.
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SubscribeI’m pretty sure some state will decide they want the ai business.
I’m sure there’s a story here but it’s not really clear that Equity in AI made it into the Texas bill.
It’s a bit surprising this is happening in Texas, but like the courts, where SCOTUS has become rational, there are numerous lower level social justice warrior judges who continue to spread the insanity of the left. DEI and ‘anti-racism’ must be removed root and branch!
It doesn’t really matter if the red states persist with DEI etc. The rate at which they are now losing investment as a result of these policies means that, within a few years, they will have lost a substantial proportion of their population as workers move to where the jobs are (and illegal migrants are removed). That, in turn, means that they will lose electoral college votes. Which means no Democrat in the White House for at least a generation. It’s a downward spiral.
In fact, the longer it takes for leftist politicians like AOC to learn not to sh!t where they sleep, the better for Republicans.
Don’t you mean the blue states? In the USA, red means Republican and blue Democrat.
Quite right. Mea culpa.
I’m a bit confused. Are we just handing AI the same free speech rights that humans have?
And are we thinking of letting AI develop agency to spout as it pleases without any human intervention?
I would say that before anything else we must be sure that every public utterance has a human guarantor. Otherwise the laws against slander and libel, against incitement (to riot or murder, etc) or yelling “Fire!” in a movie theatre, would have no meaning.
How much are we willing to sacrifice for a talking robot? And don’t the rest of us get a say in this?
With the advent of the railroad, courts and legislatures scrambled to keep up with the changing conditions. Likewise with each leap. And so with AI. The major risk I see is that the major companies in the field will get rules that strangle small, innovative companies.
“Trump’s anti-DEI crusade risks collapsing at state level”
Well, not really – if Federal funding is contingent on ditching DEI, the Left will splinter into a thousand pieces as soon as the cheques stop coming.
The Far Left has always been for sale, for the right price.