U.S. Senator Katie Britt, R-Alabama, has joined her Senate colleagues Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, and Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, in introducing the Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act—new legislation aimed at safeguarding minors from dangers associated with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots.
The senators announced the bill’s introduction at a press conference on Wednesday, where they were joined by parents of children who committed suicide or suffered from self-harm at the direct prompting of AI chatbots.
The GUARD Act would specifically require companies that develop and design AI chatbots to implement a “reasonable age verification process” for their chatbot users and subsequently ban minors from accessing and using their chatbots. Companies that fail to take these steps would be subject to civil penalties of up to $100,000 for each violation under the law.
AI chatbot developers would also face criminal liability if their chatbots solicit or induce minors to engage in sexually explicit conduct or to create depictions of such conduct, or if their chatbots encourage or promote suicide, self-injury, physical violence or sexual violence.
Additionally, the bill would require AI chatbots to disclose that they are an artificial intelligence system and not a human being at the start of every conversation with a user, and to repeat that disclosure every 30 minutes.
“I want to start by thanking the parents. Thank you so much for elevating your voice. Thank you for being willing to tell your story. And thank you for being willing to tell us about your most precious gift, your child. To all the parents out there, we hear you … [W]e are stepping up not as Democrats or Republicans, [but] as concerned parents, concerned grandparents,” Sen. Britt said at Wednesday’s press conference.
“You heard it from the parents: if AI can be this brilliant, we certainly can put the proper guardrails in place to where they are not talking to our children about sexual interplay, where they are not talking to our children about illicit drug abuse, where they are not talking to our children about self-harm,” Britt continued. “This is not hard. And if the United States Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives can’t come together on this, what can we come together on?”
The senator went on to criticize major tech corporations and called for placing stricter regulations and guardrails on AI technology.
“[W]e have got to speak directly to Big Tech and say, ‘stop putting profits ahead of people,'” Britt stated. “And in this situation, these people are children—they’re children. They need us to elevate our voice. They need us to elevate these stories so that we can protect the kids that are out there, [and] we can give parents the tools, parents who, like me, are just doing the best that we can.”
“So to Big Tech, this should be pretty simple. You should come out today and every single thing in this GUARD Act, you should be able to say… we’ll do it today. My guess is they won’t. Why? Because they’re looking at their bottom line, and they’re not looking at the people they hurt. They’ve never cared about it, and certainly now is no different,” she concluded.
In addition to Britt, Hawley and Blumenthal, U.S. Senators Mark Warner, R-Virginia, and Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut, are also signed onto the legislation as co-sponsors.
The GUARD Act is not Britt’s first time raising concerns over AI and the specific dangers that AI chatbots can pose to minors.
In August, the senator signed onto a bipartisan letter demanding answers from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg after reports surfaced of the tech giant’s AI chatbots engaging in “sensual” conversations with children.
“Meta owes the American people answers,” Britt said at the time, calling the findings “sick and twisted.”
