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Floor Speech
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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, with this year's election now in less than 100 days, we must put in place commonsense rules of the road to address the risk that AI poses for our democracy.
The risks are clear: We have heard repeatedly about the potential for AI to upend our elections. All of our witnesses, from both parties, agreed that this was a threat when we had our Rules Committee hearing.
And at the bipartisan AI forum, led by Leader Schumer, with Senators Rounds, Heinrich, and Young, we heard consensus that Federal legislation is necessary; that disclaimers are necessary for certain ads. And for others, we simply must take them down when they are pretending to be a candidate and deliberately and intentionally misleading voters. I don't care what party does it. I don't care what super PAC does it. There is absolutely no way--and these State legislatures have agreed with me, nearly unanimously, that we shouldn't at least have a disclaimer on them, much less to ban them, which is what Senators Hawley and Collins and Coons and I are suggesting in the deepfake bill.
This is a hair-on-fire moment. AI has the potential to turbocharge the spread of disinformation and deceive voters. This is why we must take action. And I hope that when people see what is going on through August, when sometimes early voting has started, we will give at least the tools to the platforms to be able to point to a Federal law--most of these other State laws have just been adopted in the last few months--and say this is not OK; that they have a right to at least require a disclaimer on these ads, just like they do on TV for various things--and we have all seen it--so that we know what is going on.
Democracy dies in the darkness, as one newspaper has said. And we are literally putting a veil over people's faces if we are not allowing them to assess whether or not the person is really the person that they are looking at on their phone or hearing in a robocall.
I just think it is outrageous if we let this continue. And I appreciate that there are Republican Governors in States and Republican legislatures who have actually seen this as I see it and that there is bipartisan support for this in the U.S. Senate. And I hope that in the fall we will revisit this.
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