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Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, AI is really grabbing some headlines, and over the past few months, Tennesseans have been watching the Senate as we go about having hearings and deciding how to handle this emerging technology. This technology has broken boundaries in ways that most people never imagined would be possible, and they see great potential in it.

Healthcare companies in Tennessee are already using AI to enhance the quality of care that doctors can offer their patients. If you have been in for a doctor's checkup in the past few years, you have probably noticed that your doctors and nurses are using more digital tools to help inform their diagnoses and choose which drugs they are going to prescribe. Most of those tools are powered by AI, as are many of the apps and gadgets that healthcare providers recommend to their patients to monitor their health and keep their treatments on track. We have seen the use of these remote monitoring tools just explode, especially in rural areas during the pandemic.

We are also seeing AI make a substantial impact on manufacturing. The largest auto manufacturers in Tennessee are already using this technology to make our cars safer and more efficient. Many of them are experimenting with automated driving systems. They are also using it to make operating a vehicle a little more practical. One that I found amusing is that Ford used AI to develop a program that would automatically hook a trailer to a hitch. Now, I know some of our Members who have farms and ranches probably think you should have that skill, but I think, for many of us, that would be a practical application.

So whether we are talking about making things safer, finding which pharmaceuticals are going to better treat diseases, or making things more convenient, AI has the potential to completely transform entire industries. Indeed, innovators are working on those components as we speak.

It also comes with significant drawbacks, and nowhere are those problems more pronounced than in Tennessee's music industry. All things considered, technology has been great for the business side of the music industry. The increased use of social media by up-and-coming musicians has allowed record labels to sign artists who have millions of fans. Platforms like Spotify automatically generate playlists that promote new music, and all of that music is available instantly via an app on your cell phone. But the thousands of musicians, songwriters, and artists who call Tennessee home are really quite worried about the lack of control they have over how AI platforms exploit their creations and their intellectual property.

This month, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to examine the downsides of making technology an essential element of the creative process. The most obvious problem that we have uncovered in our discussions with artists and songwriters comes down to a basic question of copyright infringement.

We know that to create artistic works, AI systems must train on data scraped from existing artistic works. If you look at how this technology has advanced, it becomes clear that generative AI is often trained on popular music that was used without the copyright holder's permission. One AI model that we reviewed was trained on a staggering 280,000 hours of music. There is not a reasonable person who would ever suggest that the writers and artists were compensated fairly for that 280,000 hours of use of their products that was used to train AI to mimic and clone their voices and their words.

Now, the very existence of this tech and what it produces are enough to draw challenges to spurious claims that data scraping counts as what is called fair use, but we have even more extreme examples of what AI can do after training on existing popular music, or music that has been scraped, in order to train the platform.

Most recently, an anonymous content creator uploaded an AI-generated song called ``Heart on My Sleeve.'' It was a perfect replication of the vocals of Drake and The Weeknd. It was so perfect that listeners on multiple platforms were duped into thinking it was real. The song gained over 9 million views on social media and hundreds of thousands of plays on Spotify and YouTube before the platforms took it down. But because the internet is forever, so is this fake song, and there is nothing those artists can do about it.

Not only does this raise questions about what ``fair use'' means in the age of AI, but it also raises serious concerns about our current State-by-State approach to protecting an individual right of publicity. Common sense tells us that this isn't right, even if the law is still catching up with the pace of technology. We have discussed having a Federal--a Federal--individual right of privacy law.

AI has also affected how fans interact with real music. At least on streaming platforms, playlists have outpaced platforms as the preferred listening format. Companies have employed AI-driven playlists to expose listeners to new artists, with decidedly mixed results.

Martina McBride, who knows a few things about country music, has gone public about her experience in trying to build a playlist using Spotify's ``recommender'' system. In a playlist she prompted with the words ``country music,'' she had to refresh her recommendations 13 times before it delivered a song by a female artist. Country music is an expansive genre. Yet, somehow, that algorithm spit out 120 songs by men before managing to include a song by a woman.

We could chalk up this apparent bias to a glitch in evolving tech were it not for the fact that fans rely almost exclusively on technology to listen to and discover new music. People expect more innovation, not less, because that is exactly what Big Tech is selling them. When they spin one of those customized playlists, they expect to hear a fair sampling of whatever it is they asked for, but that is clearly not what these platforms are delivering. This matters to established artists like Martina, but it matters even more to up-and- coming artists who are forced to rely on these algorithms to gain exposure to the music-listening public.

Over the past few years, Congress has learned a very important lesson about the perils of allowing technology to outpace the law.

Over the course of several hearings, we produced evidence of the unraveling of safety and security standards on social media platforms. Senator Blumenthal and I worked together on this. We heard testimony from parents, children, and industry experts. We exposed how platforms prioritize growth over maintaining even the most basic checks on predatory and dangerous content.

This Congress, we have the opportunity to put guardrails on these companies through the passage of the Kids Online Safety Act. It is a strong, bipartisan bill that will make a real difference for children and their families.

I would like to remind my colleagues that it took us far too long to engage on this issue. Indeed, when the Acting President pro tempore and I were in the House, we were leading the way in getting our colleagues to address these issues.

I think we are at the point that we can say now that this has to be done. We can't afford to wait and let AI systems be put in place without having protections for the American people. So, in recent months, we have held several hearings on this issue. Most recently, we examined the impact on intellectual property rights. In June, we fielded several firsthand accounts of how this technology could be weaponized against basic human rights. Senator Ossoff and I led that hearing.

We have yet to truly dig into the dangers of allowing China to outpace us through the use of AI, and I think it is time that we catch up.

When it comes to tech, we have done our best work when we have listened to the people and have worked with people who are closest to the issue. The Kids Online Safety Act came to be because we listened when parents spoke out about how impossible it was to protect their children in the virtual space.

Years ago, when the House Energy and Commerce Committee was crafting what would become the 21st Century Cures Act, I worked with Tennessee's healthcare innovators to include provisions that made the law more responsive to the rapid growth of the healthcare technology industry. We had similar conversations in the runup to the passage of the Music Modernization Act.

So I would encourage my colleagues to start engaging with us on this issue before it gets away from us. Listen to what creators and engineers have to say about AI's effects on their industries.

There is no turning back the clock on AI just as we learned that there was no turning back the clock on social media and that there was no turning back the clock on the World Wide Web. AI is here to stay--it is going to drive innovation--but that doesn't mean we have to accept innovation at any cost.

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