In abstract
California lawmakers created new restrictions on pupil cell telephones and deepfakes and face a quickly increasing AI sector.
Over the past 12 months, California know-how grew so pervasive and necessary that its influence lastly turned a central preoccupation of California authorities.
A few of that influence was constructive, like a surge of sudden tax income that seemingly got here from a number of profit-gushing, capital-intensive Golden State tech corporations like AI chipmaker Nvidia.
However lawmakers had been extra involved with harms than advantages.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into legislation payments banning deepfake marketing campaign advertisements, deepfake content material on huge on-line platforms, and disclosure of synthetic intelligence content material in promoting.
The governor additionally signed a invoice requiring California colleges to restrict or ban pupil use cellphones, codifying statewide a observe that has turn out to be more and more widespread on the district degree as educators look to refocus college students. Colleges in Los Angeles and San Diego took a extra crucial take a look at their use of synthetic intelligence after sad surprises involving chatbots and grading software program.
The state forms moved to replace enforcement of current legal guidelines to account for AI. The California Civil Rights Division moved to limit how employers use the know-how to display screen job candidates whereas the Authorities Operations Company set guidelines for the way state departments themselves use it.
There have been limits to the regulatory impulse: The governor vetoed a invoice to make corporations check massive AI fashions for his or her potential to assist with mass assaults, reasoning that the larger risk was overregulating an modern business. State companies, in the meantime, struggled to implement a legislation designed to assist app employees.
2025 outlook
In 2025, California lawmakers should resolve whether or not to speed up their regulation of know-how beneath Donald Trump’s second presidential time period; Trump has promised to rescind modest AI guardrails put in by the Biden administration and will use the know-how to help with mass deportations. This will likely embody one other crack at main AI curbs, provided that the governor promised to take one other swing on the drawback following his veto of the testing invoice.
