Tall Expectations (and a Suggestion) for the House’s New Bipartisan AI Task Force
BY AUBREY WILSON
This week, the House announced the creation of a bipartisan AI Task Force to help lawmakers better understand this emerging technology. As “the fastest-adopted technology to date in any history of technology adoption,” generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) may well usher in one of the most significant paradigm shifts since the creation of email in the 1970s and social media in the 1990s. The task force launch is a timely boost to Congress’ exploration of the opportunities and challenges posed by these new technologies.
In just the last year, the GenAI-powered marketplace has evolved to include a lively ecosystem of image generators, voice manipulators, audio and video creators, and customized applications. Since the release of commercially available large language models (LLMs) a little over a year ago — including the now-well-recognized ChatGPT — GenAI has been the focus of multiple hearings across multiple committees and the topic of nearly 100 bills. Notably, the House and Senate are among the world’s leading legislatures in taking proactive steps to allow for internal experimentation with commercially available GenAI — in a notable shift from how Congress typically handles new technologies!
These steps are necessary building blocks for Members who are investing the time to learn about this technology before they regulate it — a commonsense approach given the complexity and dynamism of these technologies and their evolving uses.
The House’s new task force will have a lot of coordinating and catching up to do, but each of the twenty-four appointed Members and their staff already have a key resource at their disposal: the ability to actually use the technology firsthand.
In 2023, the House CAO’s HIR issued guidance allowing for the use of ChatGPT4Plus on official devices as long as all privacy settings were enabled. As the new AI Task Force begins to organize, its members and the staff supporting them should begin investing in their own familiarity and skill sets of what a GenAI-powered LLM can do. This hands-on experience will be important to not only aid the Task Force’s eventual policy deliberations, but to also help the institution to combat the “pacing problem,” a term coined to describe the ever-growing gap between the rapid changes that emerging technologies bring and the typically slower, more linear pace of change in government.
With calls for government to regulate AI coming from industry leaders, the Pope, Swifties, and beyond, the members of the House’s new bipartisan Task Force on AI have their work cut out for them. The world is still at the starting line of GenAI, and Congress is right there, too, both with regulating the technology and with experimenting with internal adoption. As the Task Force takes shape in the weeks to come, step one is simple: take the time to explore what this emerging technology is capable of. (And if any staff are reading this and would like a tutorial, we have plenty of resources and are happy to help.)
