Published in The South Florida Sun Sentinel.
An AI regulatory fever is sweeping the country, and Florida is in danger of catching it.
The nascent technology has jumped to the top of legislative agendas, delaying consideration of other public policy issues such as red tape preventing energy abundance and outdated laws hindering innovators and small business owners. AI does merit close scrutiny and ongoing attention from legislators and regulators, but this fever is driving legislators to go much further, enacting laws that will carry significant long-term unintended consequences.
State legislators in Tallahassee are weighing the merits of SB 482, which contains a proposed Artificial Intelligence Bill of Rights and several other far-reaching proposals. If enacted, the bill would contract rather than protect the liberty of Floridians. A review of just a few of SB 482’s provisions makes this clear.
The flaws with SB 482 start on page one. A close reading of the bill’s definition of AI reveals that this bill may cover far more technology — both existing and future tools — than intended. AI, per the bill, includes an “engineered or machine-based system … that can … infer from the input it receives how to generate outputs that influence physical or virtual environments.” One legal scholar labeled this latter clause — influencing the environment — as “useless.”
Every electronic device has some influence on its surrounding environment. This may seem like semantic quibbling, but the stakes of imprecise legislation in this domain are quite high. Today’s AI is the worst AI we will ever use. Well-intentioned efforts to correct the flaws of existing tools may hinder the development and diffusion of tools with greater capabilities and fewer limitations tomorrow.
Imprecision characterizes SB 482’s so-called AI Bill of Rights, too. The bill promises Floridians “The right to know whether they are communicating with a human being or an artificial intelligence system, program or chatbot.” While a case can be made that this sort of disclosure is useful and even essential in some contexts, this broad phrasing would create an incredibly annoying online experience. Given the bill’s expansive definition of AI and the ubiquity of apps, websites and tools that include some degree of advanced computing, entities that want to comply with this right may clutter the internet with disclosures.
In short order, people will come to simply ignore these disclosures in the same way they click through privacy agreements, terms of service and cookie banners. Consider that the vast majority of internet users ignore such banners — the very thing intended to enhance their privacy makes them numb to such processes. AI disclosure requirements should be narrowly tailored to the significance of the interaction and preferences of the user.
A similar shortcoming undermines the utility of the right to know whether political advertisements are created “in whole or in part” with the use of AI. If it’s not already the case, sooner than later every ad will in some way be created “in part” with AI. A disclosure on every ad will, again, become meaningless. Here, too, legislators must be far more exacting.
The bill attempts to address troubling reports of problematic relationships forming between AI tools and minor users. Yet, this attempt misses the mark by making the state the arbiter of what’s appropriate for young Floridians. Pursuant to SB 482, AI companies would have to “institute reasonable measures to prevent its companion chatbot from producing or sharing materials harmful to minors.” Harmful materials include information that “when taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.” Such expansive language will chill innovation and stifle the creation of AI tools that may have tremendous social value to young Floridians.
Florida’s legislators face a choice: Will they be remembered for thoughtfully stewarding technological development or for catching the regulatory fever that diminishes the very freedoms they sought to protect? The irony of SB 482 is hard to miss: In attempting to safeguard liberty through an “AI Bill of Rights,” the bill would actually constrain it — limiting the tools Floridians can access, the innovations Florida companies can develop, and the economic opportunities the state might otherwise capture.