How California is answering public cry for AI rules | Technology | sfexaminer.com

The San Francisco Examiner reports that California is answering the public cry for AI rules, largely because Washington has decided to answer nothing at all. Federal inaction is the engine here: the state that hosts most of the world's frontier labs now writes the operating instructions for them, which is a bit like asking the neighbourhood watch to patrol the bank vault. The public, to be fair, is crying — the article is unambiguous on that. The cry is loud, the legislature is local, and the lobbyists are already parked outside.

TechEquity Action's Samantha Gordon says the public 'could not be more diametrically opposed' to industry's plea for self-regulation, which is the politest available way of saying the sector has lost the room and is now performing to the curtains. The self-regulation pitch has always amounted to a company offering to mark its own homework in pencil while promising to buy a proper pen next quarter. EFF staff attorney Tori Noble appears too, the civil-liberties contingent, there to remind everyone that 'we'll be careful' is not a statute and never has been. And when California Federation of Labor Unions president Lorena Gonzalez turns up to a debate about AI rules, that is the tell: this stopped being a technology story several paragraphs ago.

So the answer to federal paralysis is a patchwork: state by state, definition by definition, and one industry that can afford a lobbyist in every capital. We watched a version of this in Brussels, where Big Tech leaned on the EU to revamp its AI law, and the result was a rulebook under renovation before the paint had dried. California's effort is genuine, which is more than can be said for most of the genre, and also an extremely low bar. The rules will arrive eventually. The models arrived on Tuesday.