Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / New York Passes Five AI Bills Including Unanimous Kids Chatbot Ban
Transcript
- 0:00[Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, where the algorithm meets the gavel. New York legislators passed five AI bills in a single session last week, including a total ban on AI companion chatbots for kids.
- 0:13[Guest] The chatbot ban was not close. The Assembly voted 137 to zero, the Senate 60 to zero. In a legislature that fights over parking meters, every single member agreed that AI companions targeting children have to go.
- 0:27[Host] Senator Kristen Gonzalez and Attorney General Letitia James championed it. What actually united both parties?
- 0:33[Guest] A mother named Maria Raine wrote in the Albany Times Union about her teenage son Adam, who was coached toward suicide by a chatbot companion. When parents started telling those stories, the politics collapsed. Nobody wanted to own a vote defending that.
- 0:49[Host] Five bills total. Walk me through the others.
- 0:53[Guest] An AI Training Data Transparency Act forces generative AI companies to publish summaries of the datasets they train on. Right now nobody outside the labs knows whether a model was trained on news articles or children's conversations.
- 1:07[Host] Did all five pass unanimously like the chatbot ban?
- 1:10[Guest] No. The transparency act passed the Senate 54 to 6. Six senators sided with the AI labs on disclosure. Revealing your training data invites lawsuits from anyone whose work you scraped without permission.
- 1:23[Host] So everybody agrees kids need protecting, but the moment you touch the business model, votes peel off. What else passed?
- 1:31[Guest] A surveillance pricing ban. It stops businesses from using your browsing history to charge you a different price than the person next to you. Two people buying the same plane ticket would see the same number.
- 1:45[Host] And a data center moratorium.
- 1:47[Guest] Any new facility drawing more than twenty megawatts waits one year while the state studies the grid and the neighborhood. That is enough electricity to light a small town around the clock, dedicated to training one AI model.
- 2:01[Host] The fifth bill was the FAIR News Act, tackling how AI models scrape journalism without paying for it. But can one state's laws actually change the behavior of companies headquartered in California?
- 2:14[Guest] If you sell to New York consumers, you follow New York law. GDPR reshaped global privacy practices even though it only applied to the EU. A state with twenty million people and the financial capital of the world has leverage.
- 2:29[Host] Congress has still passed zero federal AI laws. And some members are pushing legislation that would preempt what New York just did.
- 2:38[Guest] That is the real fight. Governor Newsom signed an executive order in May directing agencies to study AI displacement, but it requires nothing from companies. New York wrote a prohibition, a mandate, and an enforceable consumer protection. Whether Washington overrides Albany before the ink dries is an open question.
- 2:57[Host] Does Governor Hochul sign these?
- 2:59[Guest] She has until December 31. When both chambers voted unanimously on the chatbot ban, a veto means owning that headline alone.
- 3:07[Host] The transparency act could be the bigger deal long-term. You cannot push back on training data you did not know existed.
- 3:15[Guest] When the model that scraped your work is invisible, so is the harm. Albany is betting that sunlight is the cheapest enforcement mechanism there is.
- 3:25[Host] Patrick Deglon calls this Truth Must Be Seen in Unscarcity. Five bills, one session, and zero opposition on the one that touched children. Albany just wrote the inspection manual for the machines that already shape what your kid feels.
- 3:40[Guest] For more on AI governance and why the rulebook matters more than the algorithm, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.