ATLANTA — A Georgia lawmaker introduced two bills this week that would try to put some curbs on artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is already making its mark on college campuses, where some students don’t mind admitting that it’s mighty handy for writing term papers. This was in June:
"Yep! It would give me a whole term paper in five minutes," gushed a Savannah State University student 11Alive interviewed in June. She declined to give her full name, adding, "Everyone cheats in college."
Artificial intelligence also shouldn’t be used to get too deep into the backgrounds of people seeking, say, health insurance – says David Schweidel at Emory.
"Maybe they're not discriminating based on the medical diagnosis. Maybe they're discriminating based on search engine history. We don’t want that," said Schweidel of the Goizueta Business School.
State Rep. Mandisha Thomas (D-South Fulton) said some of her neighbors are convinced companies using AI are holding them back. Thomas has introduced two bills in the state House. They would make it illegal to use AI to discriminate against people – and to prevent health or public assistance providers from making decisions based on AI.
"We don’t want AI to have the last word when a customer or participant in a program is on public services. We don’t want them to have the last word. We want a human to have the last word," Thomas told 11Alive.
"These are reasonable steps. What they're effectively saying is, we don’t want machines that are black boxes making important decisions," Schweidel said.
Schweidel explained these bills are the first of what he expects to be a flurry of legislation as lawmakers hear more from constituents about what worries them about AI.