Chair Ossoff, Ranking Member Blackburn and other members of the Subcommittee, thank you for inviting me to testify today on the important issue of AI and human rights. The world’s attention is rightly focused on the possibilities and the risks of AI systems. As policymakers look to address potential harms and promote responsible innovation, it is essential that they do so with a focus on human rights – and in particular, with the conviction that fundamental rights and freedoms belong inalienably to all people, including the rights to liberty, privacy, freedom of expression and opinion, peaceful assembly, and equal treatment before the law.
AI systems are already being used in ways that threaten these rights, and rapid advancements in generative AI and text and image analysis will exacerbate the risks. Today I will focus on two distinct areas where AI harms are already being felt: the use of face recognition and biometric surveillance capabilities by law enforcement, and the impact of generative AI on elections and democratic discourse. For reasons I will explain in my testimony, these applications of AI are vastly different from one another, with different considerations at stake as Congress considers appropriate policy interventions.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Talking Tech with Roy Austin & Alex Givens on The Future of AI Governance
In this episode of CDT’s Tech Talks, Roy L. Austin, Jr., inaugural director of Howard University School of Law’s AI Initiative, joins Alexandra Givens, President and CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology, to discuss the challenges and opportunities shaping the future of AI.
CDT-led Coalition Calls for Transparency for White House AI Framework
CDT and Americans for Responsible Innovation led a broad, bipartisan coalition of over two dozen civil society groups in calling on the White House to release its Framework for review of frontier AI models.
Comment to House Financial Services Committee on Regulation of AI
CDT submitted comments on the application of current federal laws and regulations related to the use of AI in the financial marketplace and any proposed reforms to provide for an appropriately modernized and comprehensive federal financial AI framework.
