California Democrat Ted Lieu is something unusual in Congress: He was a computer science major at Stanford, a course of study that led him logically to his interest in the issue of artificial intelligence, where he’s sponsored a number of bills and become one of the House’s leading experts.
A.I., as Lieu notes, has been around for a long time. But it’s generative A.I.—the kind that uses algorithms to create new content in video and other platforms—that Lieu says we need to be worried about. With the old A.I., he says, if you asked it what a cat was and showed it photos of a cat and a dog, it could pick out the cat. Today’s A.I.? “Now it generates 26 images of cats and writes you an essay about cats,” he said.