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Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Madam President, yesterday, the Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law hosted a hearing to examine the rise of artificial intelligence. In the last few months, we have had a lot of conversations here about AI, and I am grateful that we are looking at this issue. Although there are many areas where we disagree, our colleagues on each side of the aisle are paying close attention to this issue. I would encourage my colleagues to review the high points of yesterday's hearing because it truly demonstrated the scope of the challenges that we find ourselves facing.

We fielded several firsthand accounts of how this technology can be weaponized against human beings in our homes and on a national scale. We heard from Jennifer DeStefano, who was the victim of an attempted AI kidnapping and extortion scheme. Scam artists used AI to clone her 15- year-old daughter Brie's voice and then used this manufactured recording to try and extort $1 million in ransom.

Fortunately, Jennifer was able to confirm that Brie was safe. But you can see how criminals could, and indeed will, and certainly are beginning to leverage this technology against other families.

We also heard from Jeffrey Cain, an investigative journalist who has witnessed how destructive AI can be in the hands of oppressive governments. He has reported extensively on how the Chinese Communist Party is using AI to enhance their brutal surveillance state.

According to one account, the CCP has used facial recognition to track the movements of Chinese citizens. They have even used it to track their citizens as young as 9 days old. This is how the Chinese Communist Party is using this technology.

One of the things that we have learned is that China and the CCP are trying to control the market for artificial intelligence, just the same that we have learned they are doing for 5G, for quantum computing, and for other groundbreaking technologies.

They said as much back in 2017, when they released their national AI development plan. Their goal is to be the dominant force in artificial intelligence by the time we reach 2030.

But whether we are talking about the threat from scam artists or hostile foreign powers, it is time to prove that the U.S. Senate understands why we must lead in setting the standards for and developing artificial intelligence, rather than ceding this authority and this place to Xi Jinpin and the Chinese Communist Party.

That means continuing the work that we started in yesterday's hearing. It is important to note this was a bipartisan hearing. Chairman Ossoff did a great job in leading this discussion. We had great participation in this hearing.

And we have to continue to look at the uses of artificial intelligence. There are some for good, and there are some for evil, which is what we heard so much about yesterday and how it impacts human rights.

As we think about deploying AI on a broad scale, we need to focus on preserving the freedoms and the democratic values that we hold dear here in our country. It also means finally enacting a national data privacy standard to govern the collection and the sharing of our personal information.

One of our witnesses, Alexandra Givens, mentioned that this needed to be done as a fundamental foundational element before we begin to look at guardrails for AI, giving individuals the ability to protect their virtual views themselves and their information in the virtual space.

This is something that, as policymakers, we need to make sure that our existing laws can adapt to meet the challenge that is before us as we look at artificial intelligence.

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