The bill, which passed unanimously, would expand Pennsylvania’s forgery law to include digitally-generated likenesses, and make it a crime to pass them off “with intent to defraud or injure anyone.”
The measure comes on the heels of a law passed last year that added artificially-generated images to Pennsylvania’s statutes on child pornography and the non-consensual dissemination of explicit material.
But the entire effort is at risk of being nullified by the federal government.
Within the more than 1,000 pages of the proposed federal budget deal is a measure that would ban states for enforcing any regulation of artificial intelligence for the next ten years. The clause, according national media reporting, was added at the urging of AI development companies who feared a patchwork of state-level regulations.
The fallout for states would be immense.
“We’re very, very concerned,” said Sen. Tracy Pennycuick, R-Montgomery County, one of the bill’s prime sponsors.
If the federal budget deal passes as written, “what’ll happen is that will nullify all of our AI bills,” Pennycuick said, including the bill that cleared the Senate Tuesday as well as the measures that became law last year.
That concern is widely shared among both Republicans and Democrats. Hundreds of state lawmakers from across the nation – including a bipartisan contingent from Pennsylvania – signed a letter to Congress last week urging the federal government to reverse course and warning that a decade-long suspension of state laws would “restrict policymakers from responding to emerging issues.”
“We’ve got to protect our children now, and we’ve got to protect our constituents now,” as opposed to waiting for the federal government to create a regulatory framework, Pennycuick said.
The moratorium on state-level AI regulations would also affect other measures that are currently in the pipeline in Harrisburg, such as a proposal in the state House to require political campaigns to disclose when the use AI-generated images of a candidate.
The timeline for Trump’s budget bill remains unclear. While it passed the House last month, the budget deal faces hurdles in the Senate much broader than just the AI issue. The bill would add trillions of dollars to the federal deficit and debt, and cut Medicaid coverage for millions in order to offset the tax cuts Trump is seeking.
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