Opinion: California and other states are rushing to regulate AI. This is what they’re missing

Construction workers removing a six-story facade bearing the text of the 1st Amendment from the closed Newseum in Washington in 2021. The late Justice Antonin Scalia articulated it persuasively in 2011, noting that “whatever the challenges of applying the Constitution to ever-advancing technology, the basic principles of freedom of speech and the press … do not vary.” These principles should be front of mind for congressional Republicans and David Sacks, Trump’s recently chosen artificial intelligence czar, as they make policy on that emerging technology. And with good reason: As Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson observed in 1945, the Constitution’s framers “did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us,” and therefore “every person must be his own watchman for truth.” California nevertheless enacted a law in September targeting “deceptive,” digitally modified content about political candidates. Two weeks after the law went into effect, a judge blocked it, writing that the “principles safeguarding the people’s right to criticize government … apply even in the new technological age” and that penalties for such criticism “have no place in our system of governance.” Opinion Editorial: Why California should lead on AI regulation It’s wishful thinking that Congress and the federal government will put guardrails on AI to reduce the risk of catastrophic harms. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s application of the 1st Amendment to that new technology was so complete that it left Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Mike Godwin wondering “whether I ought to retire from civil liberties work, my job being mostly done.” Godwin would go on to serve as general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia — which, he wrote, “couldn’t exist without the work that cyberlibertarians had done in the 1990s to guarantee freedom of expression and broader access to the internet.” Today humanity is developing a technology with even more knowledge-generating potential than the internet.