South Dakota senator eyes guardrails for artificial intelligence amid technology's rapid advancement

Chuck Schumer picks Sen. Mike Rounds to lead bipartisan panel on AI regulatory package

Photo by Shahadat Rahman on Unsplash

Sen. Mike Rounds believes artificial intelligence (AI) will change the world.

It’s why the Fort Pierre native is spending much of his time in Washington, D.C. on a bipartisan workgroup studying the simulation of human intelligence processes through computer programming.

“This is a response to new developments in AI,” Rounds told The Dakota Scout, though he acknowledges AI has been advancing for decades. “This has been here for a long time, not just in the form of things like ChatGPT. (But) we have to stay ahead of the developments in this.”

Rounds this summer was tapped by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to lead a small group tasked with outlining an AI legislation package, anticipated to be introduced by year’s end.

Rounds noted the need to work across the aisle on a topic as broad and potentially far-reaching as AI.

“We are trying not to make this a partisan discussion,” he said. “We are trying to avoid this administration or the previous one for anything; we want to bring Republicans and Democrats alike to give everyone a sense of the industry and the terminology surrounding it.”

And it comes at a pivotal time, too. With the advent of consumer-oriented AI applications like ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, some of Rounds’ colleagues in the Senate have already begun introducing legislation attempting to regulate the technology.

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