A new bipartisan Senate bill introduced on Tuesday wants AI-generated content to be clearly labeled in order to provide more transparency to the American public.
Sens. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and John Kennedy, R-La., introduced the AI Labeling Act of 2023 on Oct. 24 to help ensure people know when they are interacting with an artificial intelligence chatbot or AI-generated content.
“People deserve to know whether or not the videos, photos, and content they see and read online is real or not,” Sen. Schatz said in a press release. “Our bill is simple – if any content is made by artificial intelligence, it should be labeled so that people are aware and aren’t fooled or scammed.”
“AI is moving quickly, and so are the companies that are developing it. Our bill would set an AI-based standard to protect U.S. consumers by telling them whether what they’re reading, seeing or hearing is the product of AI, and that’s clarity that people desperately need,” added Sen. Kennedy.
The bill would require the disclosure to be a “clear and conspicuous notice,” as well as permanent or unable to be easily removed by other users.
Additionally, the legislation would require AI developers and third-party licensees to take action to prevent systemic publication of content without disclosures.
It also would task the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in coordination with other Federal agencies, to create a working group that can assist social media platforms in automatically identifying AI-generated content.
“Content made by AI should be clearly labeled as such so people know what they’re looking at. That’s exactly what the bipartisan AI Labeling Act that Senator Kennedy and I introduced calls for,” Sen. Schatz said Tuesday on the Senate floor. “It puts the onus where it belongs – on companies, not consumers. Because people shouldn’t have to double and triple check, or parse through thick lines of code, to find out whether something was made by AI. It should be right there, in the open, clearly marked with a label.”
The senators introduced the bill just days before the Biden administration is expected to release its AI executive order (EO), which will work to harness the benefits of the emerging technology while also managing the risks.
Additionally, AI experts at the Dell Technologies Forum in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday called on policymakers to build trust and transparency into future AI policy.
“We should start thinking about transparency and disclosure,” said John Roese, the global chief technology officer at Dell Technologies. “If you walked into a supermarket, picked up something and it didn’t have a food label on it, would you eat it? Of course not. Because after a few decades, we’ve been conditioned to say that disclosure is important.”
