'It feels like early COVID': The messy scramble to regulate AI

Ah, marvellous. CNN has surveyed the smoking wreck of American AI governance and discovered the federal government is doing what it does best: absolutely nothing, with great vigour and a bipartisan smile. Congress has passed no overall AI-regulation legislation — none, zero, not even a committee chairman's strongly-worded letter — while the White House has achieved the Herculean feat of having "little consensus" on which of its own departments is supposed to be holding the wheel. The network even found an AI policy expert willing to place on the record the immortal words: "It's somewhat of a mess right now." That is the Washington equivalent of a five-alarm fire being described as "a bit warm, possibly, in the lower floors."

The comparison to early COVID is almost insultingly apt. Remember the scramble for ventilators, the fifty different state responses, the federal guidance that changed direction faster than a lobbyist at a fund-raiser? We are now performing the same danse macabre with a technology that can generate a plausible congressional testimony, complete with footnotes and citations, before the hearing's first witness has finished adjusting his microphone. And while the states do their thing — California, bless its heart, has at least passed a bill to stop employers reading workers' neural signals, which is the most 21st-century sentence ever written — Washington cannot decide whether a large language model is a toaster, a telephone operator, a rival superpower, or a particularly stroppy weather system with a vocabulary.

So yes, it feels like early COVID: the same floating dread, the same over-reliance on whichever expert is shouting most loudly into a Zoom call, the same possibility that we will spend three years arguing about the correct way to fold a lie while the model quietly automates the ability to fold everything else. The one comfort is that COVID eventually produced a vaccine, whereas the only solution on offer for AI is a congressional hearing in which senators solemnly ask a CEO whether the "auto-complete" can be used to hack the Pentagon. Marvellous. Somebody get me a pint and a properly drafted statute.