The US will weigh a ban on children's access to companion bots, as two senators announced bipartisan legislation Tuesday that would criminalize making chatbots that encourage harms like suicidal ideation or engage kids in sexually explicit chats.
At a press conference, Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced the GUARD Act, joined by grieving parents holding up photos of their children lost after engaging with chatbots.
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Failing to block a minor from engaging with chatbots that are stoking harmful conduct—such as exposing minors to sexual chats or encouraging "suicide, non-suicidal self-injury, or imminent physical or sexual violence"—could trigger fines of up to $100,000, Time reported. (That's perhaps small to a Big Tech firm, but notably higher than the $100 maximum payout that one mourning parent suggested she was offered.)
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It covers any AI chatbot that "provides adaptive, human-like responses to user inputs" and "is designed to encourage or facilitate the simulation of interpersonal or emotional interaction, friendship, companionship, or therapeutic communication," Time reported.
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"In their race to the bottom, AI companies are pushing treacherous chatbots at kids and looking away when their products cause sexual abuse, or coerce them into self-harm or suicide," Blumenthal told NBC News. "Our legislation imposes strict safeguards against exploitative or manipulative AI, backed by tough enforcement with criminal and civil penalties."Hawley agreed with Garcia that the AI industry must align with America's morals and values, telling NBC News that "AI chatbots pose a serious threat to our kids.
"More than 70 percent of American children are now using these AI products," Hawley said.
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The tech industry has already voiced opposition. On Tuesday, Chamber of Progress, a Big Tech trade group, criticized the law as taking a "heavy-handed approach" to child safety. The group's vice president of US policy and government relations, K.J. Bagchi, said that "we all want to keep kids safe, but the answer is balance, not bans."It's better to focus on transparency when kids chat with AI, curbs on manipulative design, and reporting when sensitive issues arise," Bagchi said.
However, several organizations dedicated to child safety online, including the Young People's Alliance, the Tech Justice Law Project, and the Institute for Families and Technology, cheered senators' announcement Tuesday. The GUARD Act, these groups told Time, is just "one part of a national movement to protect children and teens from the dangers of companion chatbots."
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During Tuesday's press conference, Blumenthal noted that the chatbot ban bill was just one initiative of many that he and Hawley intend to raise to heighten scrutiny on AI firms.
(Score: 3, Funny) by acid andy on Thursday October 30, @11:10AM
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday October 30, @12:14PM (3 children)
I vehemently disagree with this. The technology is too immature to try to regulate it. Imagine if they'd done this to the internet in 1996; Trying to build everything safe would have meant nothing got built.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Undefined on Thursday October 30, @02:52PM (1 child)
This is only another means to appear to "save the children" aimed at the poorly informed in order to gather their votes. These legislators don't know enough about the tech to know what is, is not, or might be required. Pretty much the same as a great deal else they stick their clueless noses into, IMO.
If they really wanted to save the children (as well as everyone else), they'd make sure they had decent healthcare. But we already know how that has gone.
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday October 31, @02:32PM
Every country/government has their own problems. American healthcare could be worse. Perhaps it could be better, but it's grown to what it is due to the nature of the American people. America as a nation grew from rebellion. America also grew together through adversity. Now, America is declining through apathy, in part. However, the current political climate has a lot in common with the political climate that led-up to the American Civil War. Once upon a time, you could have reasonable discussions, if even somewhat heated discussions about divisive topics in politics. You can't do that and still maintain friendships at this point. Let alone have a "reasonable discussion" with people you don't know that well.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Friday October 31, @02:24PM
The problem is that kids have unfiltered access to the internet. Up until recently, that would have included my own kid. However, they also didn't have unsupervised access to the internet. Now, I have a whitelist setup with squid. Everything else is blocked by default. Getting all of the bits and bobs for Steam unblocked was a bit of a hassle, but I did eventually run across the correct support document by searching for "steam ports". Which lists a bunch of ports that need access and 7 different domains that are required for all steam services to work. This was by no means a comprehensive list, but it did help a ton.
There are all kinds of controls in society to "keep the children safe". Part of this is due to the fact that people can be mean, exploitative, and evil. Ideally the government shouldn't be meddling. In the current society, someone needs to do something to help the kids. Also, with the incessant creep of technology and the huge boom of "AI" at the moment. It's perfectly reasonable for an average person/parent to have no idea what this "AI" stuff is or that it could possibly do something so massively stupid as to encourage a kid to commit suicide. The problem is that "AI" isn't smart, at best, it appears smart, and people assume that it wouldn't do something that would be "obviously massively stupid". That's assuming they even know what the likes of ChatGPT/Grok are in the first place.
Relying on the likes of OpenAI/Google/Meta/Facebook/Twitter to make good decisions for users. Is a massively stupid idea. They will do what they perceive as good for the company and/or good for themselves. Users are the suckers to be manipulated.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday October 30, @03:09PM (2 children)
A child, teenager or even young adult, living and growing up in a functioning family with healthy personal relationships and/or in socially stabilized community, does not kill itself suddenly just because some funny machine or fluffy toy telling to do that. That's a joke. I do not take that.
There must be a much much deeper reason for such serious action. Stress accumulated for years. No-escapable environment. Psychological collapse. Just like with prevalent school shooters.
My first suspicion who to blame guilty would be... their narcissist parents. Exactly those holding up photos of their children in public, presenting themselves a victim, but actually kept their progeny in unbearable family dictature, systematically breaking the will of their own children for years to force them obey up to the point of shattering their willingness to live.
They are even incapable to reflect the real cause for themselves.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by jb on Friday October 31, @07:32AM
Well said. Couldn't agree more.
The most important difference between a bot or any other kind of tech gadget making nasty suggestions and a person making the same suggestions is that you can turn off the gadget or even dispose of it altogether (at least for now) at which point the problem goes away.
When they try to introduce Nineteen Eighty-Four style "viewscreens" that must not be turned off, that will be the time to break out the pitch forks and flaming torches. Until then the solution is much simpler: children (and those adults who missed out!) simply need to be taught to think for themselves.
(Score: 4, Touché) by aafcac on Friday October 31, @06:21PM
Yes, but OTOH, kids that go on to kill themselves do sometimes grow up in loving and supportive households and just have massive mental health issues that nobody notices.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 30, @08:10PM (2 children)
Pretty soon you'll have to show your ID to post on soylent. Everyone and their mother is trying to legislate de-anonymizing requirements for anywhere user content is posted. I don't buy that this is about the youth for a single second.
Show your ID to chatbots (kompromat galore), on social media, on youtube, tiktok, for your email. We pinky promise that they won't hold or link the data until too many reports come out making use of said information. Anyone who complains will get a visit or simply deleted.
The internet is absolutely COOKED. See you on TOR because I'm not fucking having it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Friday October 31, @02:40PM (1 child)
I'm perfectly fine with blocking access to tools that could reasonably harm a minor. There are things that you get carded for at the grocery store that are an inconvenience to many, but are done to keep them out of the hands of children. Some things just shouldn't be accessible to minors. Companies will not govern themselves. They will take all the money they can get away with. This includes suckering kids into gambling type mechanics for games as well as hooking them on "companion bots". To be fair, gambling like mechanics have been in games, before computers were a thing. However, gambling with "real money" has been a controlled thing for an extremely long time. Loot boxes and microtransactions in general have taken things beyond the "clear-cut gambling" definitions.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Touché) by aafcac on Friday October 31, @08:02PM
TBH, most of the things we're talking about banning probably shouldn't be used by adults either in most cases.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by srobert on Friday October 31, @04:26PM
I just recently saw the movie Megan on streaming. The first half or so of the movie seemed to be about these sorts of issues, with Megan undermining what little parenting the child received from her mother and rendering her obsolete as a parent. Then somewhere in the second half it became a movie about a Terminator type robot that's just killing people. It was as if the writers had an interesting story to tell but then painted themselves into a corner and had nowhere to go. So they ended with a Hollywood SciFi trope.
I wonder if the Senators saw that movie.
Judging from the legislation that's offered up I think they still don't understand the biggest danger of AI, being that its purpose is to render vast portions of humanity permanently unemployed and without income. Perhaps the billionaires who put them in the Senate don't care about that.