During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last week, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) spoke about self-regulation within the AI industry.
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00:00Schatz, Senator Schatz, apologies. No problem, Chairman. Thank you for being
00:06here. I just want to follow up on the chairman's question and a sort of, it may
00:10be an emerging consensus on the committee. Okay, I don't think there's
00:14anybody even on this side of the dais that's proposing a sort of European style
00:19pre-approval. I think there are some people who would like to do nothing at
00:23all in the regulatory space, but I think most people understand that some guard
00:28rails, those are the words that you use, Mr. Altman, rules and guardrails are
00:35necessary. Are you saying that self-regulation is sufficient at the
00:40current moment? No, I think some policy is good. I think it is easy for it to go
00:50too far and as I've learned more about how the world works, I'm more afraid that it
00:55could go too far and have really bad consequences, but people want to use
00:59products that are generally safe. You know, when you get on an airplane, you kind
01:03of don't think about doing the safety testing yourself. You're like, this is, well,
01:06maybe this is a bad time to use the airplane example, but you kind of like
01:09want to just trust that you can get on an airplane. It's an excellent time to use the
01:12airplane example, but I think your point is exactly right, is that, look,
01:17there is a race, but we need to understand what we're racing for, right? And it
01:21it also has to do with American values. It's not just a sort of commercial race
01:26so we can edge out our near-peer competitor, both in the public sector and
01:31the private sector. We're trying to win a race so that American values prevail
01:35internationally. Mr. Smith, I want to move on to another topic. It seems to me that
01:42on the consumer side, that one of the most basic rights of a user on the Internet is
01:51to understand what they're looking at or listening to and whether or not it was
01:55created solely by a person, a person using an AI or automatically generated using AI.
02:03Do you think a labeling regime, not a prohibition on the use of AI, but just the
02:09disclosure, especially as it relates to images, music, creativity, do you think a
02:15label would be helpful for consumers? Generally, yes. And I think that's what we in the
02:20industry have been working to create. I think you're right to make the
02:23distinction and focus especially on, say, images, video, audio files. There's a
02:29standard called C2PA that we in a number of companies now have been advancing. It
02:35has content credentials. It enables people to know where something was created, who
02:40created it, and I think you're right to know whether it was created by a person, by AI,
02:45or a person with the help of, say, AI. I just want to use sort of a common language,
02:51not the language that all of you use or that we've all learned to use. When you
02:54talk about the data as one of the three elements that makes a model work, data
02:59really is intellectual property. It is human innovation, human creativity, and I do
03:08think we may have a disagreement, and I agree with Senator Klobuchar, about the need
03:12to understand that these models have been trained on data, but what we're really
03:17talking about is human achievement all the way up to now. And I have a deep worry.
03:22Look, I'm actually an optimist in the energy space, in the public service space,
03:27certainly in health innovation. There are a lot of really exciting opportunities
03:33here, but we're going to pay people for their knowledge, and I am concerned that
03:38these models are going to be so successful in spitting out what appears to be
03:43knowledge that we're going to, on the back end, not pay people for all of the
03:48the inputs, and we will have a sort of stalling out of these models. And you
03:54talked about attention, but I'm trying to figure out what the tension really is,
03:57other than you'd like to pay as little as possible for these inputs. Go ahead, Mr. Smith.
04:03Well, you had me until the last sentence. I know. Look, we create intellectual property. We
04:13respect intellectual property. So we're emphatically of the view that intellectual
04:18property and the creation of it should be rewarded. Ultimately, intellectual property
04:22laws are always about drawing the line. It's really the line that you referred to. In copyright,
04:28there is expression that is protected. If you write a book and somebody copies it,
04:33then you are entitled to be paid. But there are ideas. If someone reads your book, if someone
04:40remembers that, you know, Shakespeare wrote a story about two teenagers who fell in love,
04:46then that's fair use. That's why this country, the Congress created it. That's what we need to
04:52focus on. With your permission, Chairman, I want to ask one final question. Proceed.
04:57Thank you. I'm actually quite excited about the prospect that in 20 years, people are going to
05:04say, remember when you had to wait on the phone to talk to Kaiser Permanente or the VA? So I just,
05:13maybe Mr. Altman and Mr. Smith, I want you to, you know, a buddy of mine used to say, paint a picture
05:19and paint me in it. Okay? For the government actually delivering services, I want you to describe
05:25what an AI agent or AI can do to kind of reduce those pain points that we accept as a fact of life
05:33in interacting with the government. It seems to me so much of what makes us irritated with the
05:38government is the lack of sorting data that exists somewhere, but we can't get access to it. So just
05:43very quickly, you have 15 seconds each for some cheerleading. I can imagine a future where the
05:48U.S. government offers a AI-powered service that makes it really easy to use all government services
05:54to get great health care, to get great education. You have this thing in your pocket, and if you have
05:58any medical problem, you get an answer. If you need to, you know, like appeal something on some
06:03process you're having with the government or file your taxes or whatever, you just do it instantly.
06:06You have an agent in your pocket fully integrated with the United States government, and life is easy.
06:11Anything to add? Remember when you had to stand in line to renew your driver's license?
06:17Remember when you didn't know how to report a pothole that needed to be repaired on your street?
06:22Remember when you had a fender bender in a car, and you had to fill out all these forms and talk
06:27to all these people to get insurance coverage? Now you can do it all with one AI system. You can use
06:34your phone. And by the way, you can do this today in Abu Dhabi. We need to bring it to America.
06:41Senator Buck.