Senators want to deny the Section 230 shield to AI companies

Just as the European Union (EU) gears up to regulate artificial intelligence, a couple of US senators have come up with new bipartisan legislation that holds companies accountable for any illegal or harmful content generated by their AI tools. Introduced by Senators Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), the No Section 230 Immunity for AI Act does what its name suggests. The proposed Senate bill denies Section 230 safeguards to AI creators.

Section 230 is the shield that protects social media platforms from being held accountable for the content that users post or create on their platforms. It gives companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube immunity against misinformation or harmful content shared by their users. There have been several attempts to reform the legislation over the years. Hawley himself has been part of the group pushing for this reform in the past. However, all of those attempts stalled very quickly and Section 230 remained intact.

But, the burgeoning AI growth in recent months has now led to another push for reform. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Google Bard, Dall-E, Google MusicLM, and others can generate various forms of content based on prompts provided by users. These tools can create everything from lengthy text and images to music and videos simply using short text prompts. The newly-introduced bill aims to hold the creators of these tools accountable for illegal content generated by users, like deepfake images or audio.

This Senate bill would strip Section 230 immunity from AI companies

“AI-generated deepfakes – lifelike false images and videos of real individuals – are exploding in popularity. Ordinary people can now suffer life-destroying consequences for saying things they never said or doing things they never would.

Companies complicit in this process should be held accountable in court,” senators Hawley and Blumenthal said (via). They want to strip Section 230 immunity from these companies and empower US citizens to sue them in court should someone use AI tools to ruin their reputation. Along with the person who misused the tool, of course.

This comes shortly after ChatGPT creator OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman called for the government to act on AI. There are already talks over a pause on AI experimentation to give lawmakers time to come up with regulations.

Some industry experts see unregulated AI as dangerous as nuclear war. European lawmakers recently passed an AI Act and are aiming to turn it into law by the year. It remains to be seen if Hawley and Blumenthal succeed in realizing this proposed legislation. An equivalent House bill needs to pass a vote before it can turn into law.