Certain applications of artificial intelligence -- including those for law enforcement -- should be strictly prohibited while others can be responsibly managed under a risk-based approach, according to Texas state Rep. Giovanni Capriglione (R).
Capriglione is sponsor of the Texas Responsible AI Governance Act, or TRAIGA, a bill that has drawn criticism from consumer advocates who are wary it would undo an individuals’ right to sue companies for AI harms, as well as from free market advocates who have classified it as “woke” for requiring impact assessments for “high-risk” systems to guard against algorithmic discrimination.
“Let's talk about how some people use AI under the cloak of law enforcement … and this is a touchy subject in Texas, but I’ve got to be honest with you, there is a point where our Founding Fathers did not actually want a police state, where they did not want cameras on every single road or on every single post,” Capriglione said.
The Republican lawmaker spoke Nov. 21 at an event hosted by the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Foundation for American Innovation to discuss “Visions of the Future: Responsible AI Policy.”
Neither nonprofit fully discloses their donors, but Capriglione and representatives from the groups described a need to establish a conservative alternative to state bills such as California’s SB 1047-- which was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) -- in the face of competition from China to lead on how the technology advances.
“We have things in our bill that talk about social scoring. You all know in China about how their government uses things that you've said, places you've been to make determinations on what you can do in the future,” the lawmaker said. “Those are the kind of things that we want to ban.”
Among other things, TRAIGA notes “An artificial intelligence system shall not be developed or deployed with the purpose or capability of capturing, through the targeted or untargeted gathering of images or other media from the internet or any other publicly available source, a biometric identifier of an individual.”
That would severely curtail the use of facial recognition technology -- a prominent application of AI -- in ways that it’s already being used in the state and in which only a few Republicans at the federal level have opposed.
But Capriglione was also the architect of Texas’ privacy bill, and where progressives often focus on the need for privacy regulations to curtail commercial surveillance, his framing centers on the threat posed by the government’s abuse of AI enabled by the massive collection of personal data.
He suggested artificial intelligence means privacy and data security protections are now about much more than Social Security numbers.
“It's about when you go to bed, it's what church you go to, it's what you bought yesterday and what you're probably going to buy tomorrow,” he said. “It's what your kids like looking at and what's going to keep them on their phone for another three hours. That's the information that's being collected all the time.”
Returning to the law enforcement use case, he said, the founding fathers “didn't want to have dragnets which is what's happening in Texas today, where there's license plate readers everywhere, where there's cameras checking to see if you're in compliance with code. There's apps, for instance, right now today, that are being used by Dallas in particular, and probably other places [where] they'll compare photos of people in crimes to the billions of photos that are available on the internet. And they're comparing those potential criminals with your kids, with you that have posted [photos] on Facebook and others.”
“That's not what our Founding Fathers intended at all, and those are the kind of things that we have to protect” against, he said, “because the most dangerous part of all of this is the ability for government to have their hands on this and use it against us.”
Capriglione emphasized that while the bill already has support lined up in the state legislature’s senate, it is still only in draft form and that he is continuing to solicit feedback for its improvement.
“Tomorrow we’re having another stakeholder meeting and we've received already over 50 requests for changes in our bill,” he said. “If you come to the auditorium tomorrow at two o'clock, you'll see about 230 different groups that have decided to come and talk to us about our bill.”
He welcomed the attention, quipping “we have a draft of a bill that has apparently gone around the world,” and noted his goal, like so many others, is to strike the right balance between innovation and consumer protection.
“As we work on this draft, we're taking everything into account. We're not going to follow a model that is so progressive that even Gavin Newsom vetoed it,” he said. “But we're also not going to say, ‘hey, do what you want, companies.’ Our goal and our obligation is to create a model, a red state model, that other states can go and look at, that's our goal.”
He said his aim is to “make sure that Texas has still the ability to be innovative, have all these awesome companies come to Texas, hire all these workers, use it for government agencies, use it to make efficiencies in public government, but protect our liberties.”