Congressional Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce committee introduced a budget reconciliation bill late last night that included a broad prohibition on state laws or regulations relating to AI or automated decision systems. The language would prohibit the enforcement of laws already passed by many states, and would prohibit the enforcement of future AI protections.
“Congress has long abdicated its responsibility to pass laws to address emerging consumer protection harms; under this bill, it would also prohibit the states from taking actions to protect their residents,” said Grace Gedye, policy analyst for AI issues at Consumer Reports. “While artificial intelligence can have enormous benefits for consumers, it also presents special challenges — such as the creation of “deepfake” videos and the “black box” nature of its operation and decisionmaking. This incredibly broad preemption would prevent states from taking action to deal with all sorts of harms, from non-consensual intimate AI images, audio, and video, to AI-driven threats to critical infrastructure or market manipulation, to protecting AI whistleblowers, to assessing high-risk AI decision-making systems for bias or other errors, to simply requiring AI chatbots to disclose that they aren’t human.”
In May 2024, CR’s survey research team conducted a nationally representative multi-mode survey of 2,022 US adults on several topics, including AI and algorithmic decision-making. The full report on the AI and algorithmic decision-making survey results is available here.
We asked Americans how comfortable they felt with the use of AI and algorithms in a variety of situations, such as banks using algorithms to determine if they qualified for a personal loan, landlords using AI to screen potential tenants, hospitals using AI to help make diagnoses and develop treatment plans, and potential employers using AI to analyze applicants’ video job interviews. We found a majority of Americans are uncomfortable with the use of AI in each of these high-stakes decisions about their lives.
Gedye continued, “Nationally representative surveys make clear that Americans are concerned about the use of AI in high-stakes decisions about their lives, like whether they are hired for their dream job, whether they are chosen for a rental unit, or whether they are offered a personal loan. States have passed legislation and are working on rules that would shine a bit of sunlight on how AI is used in exactly those situations, but this preemption would keep Americans in the dark. More transparency is important, because it’s clear AI systems sometimes make mistakes, or draw fanciful conclusions”
Consumer Reports also recently conducted research on how AI voice cloning tools can facilitate fraud and impersonation. CR assessed six products available for free or low cost online, and found that a majority of the products assessed did not have meaningful safeguards to stop fraud or misuse of their product.
Contact: cyrus.rassool@consumer.org