Artificial intelligence has plenty of promise to improve society, but it also threatens to empower scammers, child sex offenders and others, North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson told reporters Wednesday.
Jackson, a Democrat, is teaming up with Utah Attorney General Derek Brown, a Republican, to lead a new national effort helping attorneys general in other states brainstorm and enforce rules seeking to target the dark side and illicit uses of artificial intelligence.
State AGs spend much of their time on consumer protection issues, particularly fighting scams. Jackson said if AI can continue to be used with essentially no rules, that would likely lead to bigger, more sophisticated scams.
“There’s some very promising developments there,” Jackson said of AI. “But as AGs, we’re also seeing ways that this technology can be abused — voice cloning, deep fakes, AI robocalls.”
Brown said there are also serious concerns about people using AI to create fake pornographic images, including of children. “This just highlights the need to create guardrails,” he said.
It’s not just North Carolina and Utah. Also joining in on the effort are attorneys general from Alabama, Idaho, Illinois, Massachusetts and other states.
Their effort is a rebuke of Republican President Donald Trump, who last month signed an executive order that threatens to strip federal funding from any states that enact new regulations on AI. Trump issued the executive order after his fellow Republicans in Congress rejected Trump’s attempt to pass a new law banning states from regulating AI. An executive order has less power than a law.
Trump, whose return to power in 2024 was fueled in part by major donations from tech industry leaders, says economic development will be hurt if companies making AI tools have to follow different rules in different states. He wanted the federal government alone to be in charge of setting new rules.
Congress disagreed, following a broad political outcry by politicians and voters on both sides of the aisle at the idea that states wouldn’t be allowed to pass their own rules to protect people from AI misuse.
Jackson, who served one term in Congress representing a Charlotte-area district before becoming the state’s top lawyer last year, said Wednesday that individual states are better equipped to tackle big, cutting-edge issues than Congress is.
“My experience with Congress — looking at social media, looking at internet privacy, even for kids — is that they’re just very unlikely to act, at least until something becomes a major problem,” Jackson said. “So for us … if we handcuff the states, are we really in a position to trust Congress to put up safeguards when we know they have a really poor track record of being able to do that?”
Brown said he agreed that relying on Congress to regulate AI in lieu of the states would be a mistake.
“This is a perfect demonstration of, quite frankly, why the 10th Amendment matters,” he said. “States really are laboratories of democracy. I think we’re faster. We are more nimble. Here in Utah, we have passed a number of really landmark pieces of legislation that we’re working through on AI.”
Also on their call Wednesday were some AI industry insiders, who Jackson and Brown said should also be involved in discussions about new rules for the industry.
Jackson said stopping deepfake child pornography is one good example of a goal he believes the AI industry shares with state leaders and the general public. Having their insider knowledge could be key to developing new rules to stop it, he said.
“The more I talk with folks in the industry, the more I believe we’re all on the same page,” Jackson said. “We don’t want these harms to our kids. The question is: How do we go about doing this? And hopefully that is what can emerge from this task force.”
