Brian Schatz Asks OpenAI CEO Sam Altman If Self-Regulation Within Industry Is 'Sufficient'

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During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last week, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) spoke about self-regulation within the AI industry.

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00:00Schatz, Senator Schatz, apologies. No problem, Chairman. Thank you for being

00:06here. I just want to follow up on the chairman's question and a sort of, it may

00:10be an emerging consensus on the committee. Okay, I don't think there's

00:14anybody even on this side of the dais that's proposing a sort of European style

00:19pre-approval. I think there are some people who would like to do nothing at

00:23all in the regulatory space, but I think most people understand that some guard

00:28rails, those are the words that you use, Mr. Altman, rules and guardrails are

00:35necessary. Are you saying that self-regulation is sufficient at the

00:40current moment? No, I think some policy is good. I think it is easy for it to go

00:50too far and as I've learned more about how the world works, I'm more afraid that it

00:55could go too far and have really bad consequences, but people want to use

00:59products that are generally safe. You know, when you get on an airplane, you kind

01:03of don't think about doing the safety testing yourself. You're like, this is, well,

01:06maybe this is a bad time to use the airplane example, but you kind of like

01:09want to just trust that you can get on an airplane. It's an excellent time to use the

01:12airplane example, but I think your point is exactly right, is that, look,

01:17there is a race, but we need to understand what we're racing for, right? And it

01:21it also has to do with American values. It's not just a sort of commercial race

01:26so we can edge out our near-peer competitor, both in the public sector and

01:31the private sector. We're trying to win a race so that American values prevail

01:35internationally. Mr. Smith, I want to move on to another topic. It seems to me that

01:42on the consumer side, that one of the most basic rights of a user on the Internet is

01:51to understand what they're looking at or listening to and whether or not it was

01:55created solely by a person, a person using an AI or automatically generated using AI.

02:03Do you think a labeling regime, not a prohibition on the use of AI, but just the

02:09disclosure, especially as it relates to images, music, creativity, do you think a

02:15label would be helpful for consumers? Generally, yes. And I think that's what we in the

02:20industry have been working to create. I think you're right to make the

02:23distinction and focus especially on, say, images, video, audio files. There's a

02:29standard called C2PA that we in a number of companies now have been advancing. It

02:35has content credentials. It enables people to know where something was created, who

02:40created it, and I think you're right to know whether it was created by a person, by AI,

02:45or a person with the help of, say, AI. I just want to use sort of a common language,

02:51not the language that all of you use or that we've all learned to use. When you

02:54talk about the data as one of the three elements that makes a model work, data

02:59really is intellectual property. It is human innovation, human creativity, and I do

03:08think we may have a disagreement, and I agree with Senator Klobuchar, about the need

03:12to understand that these models have been trained on data, but what we're really

03:17talking about is human achievement all the way up to now. And I have a deep worry.

03:22Look, I'm actually an optimist in the energy space, in the public service space,

03:27certainly in health innovation. There are a lot of really exciting opportunities

03:33here, but we're going to pay people for their knowledge, and I am concerned that

03:38these models are going to be so successful in spitting out what appears to be

03:43knowledge that we're going to, on the back end, not pay people for all of the

03:48the inputs, and we will have a sort of stalling out of these models. And you

03:54talked about attention, but I'm trying to figure out what the tension really is,

03:57other than you'd like to pay as little as possible for these inputs. Go ahead, Mr. Smith.

04:03Well, you had me until the last sentence. I know. Look, we create intellectual property. We

04:13respect intellectual property. So we're emphatically of the view that intellectual

04:18property and the creation of it should be rewarded. Ultimately, intellectual property

04:22laws are always about drawing the line. It's really the line that you referred to. In copyright,

04:28there is expression that is protected. If you write a book and somebody copies it,

04:33then you are entitled to be paid. But there are ideas. If someone reads your book, if someone

04:40remembers that, you know, Shakespeare wrote a story about two teenagers who fell in love,

04:46then that's fair use. That's why this country, the Congress created it. That's what we need to

04:52focus on. With your permission, Chairman, I want to ask one final question. Proceed.

04:57Thank you. I'm actually quite excited about the prospect that in 20 years, people are going to

05:04say, remember when you had to wait on the phone to talk to Kaiser Permanente or the VA? So I just,

05:13maybe Mr. Altman and Mr. Smith, I want you to, you know, a buddy of mine used to say, paint a picture

05:19and paint me in it. Okay? For the government actually delivering services, I want you to describe

05:25what an AI agent or AI can do to kind of reduce those pain points that we accept as a fact of life

05:33in interacting with the government. It seems to me so much of what makes us irritated with the

05:38government is the lack of sorting data that exists somewhere, but we can't get access to it. So just

05:43very quickly, you have 15 seconds each for some cheerleading. I can imagine a future where the

05:48U.S. government offers a AI-powered service that makes it really easy to use all government services

05:54to get great health care, to get great education. You have this thing in your pocket, and if you have

05:58any medical problem, you get an answer. If you need to, you know, like appeal something on some

06:03process you're having with the government or file your taxes or whatever, you just do it instantly.

06:06You have an agent in your pocket fully integrated with the United States government, and life is easy.

06:11Anything to add? Remember when you had to stand in line to renew your driver's license?

06:17Remember when you didn't know how to report a pothole that needed to be repaired on your street?

06:22Remember when you had a fender bender in a car, and you had to fill out all these forms and talk

06:27to all these people to get insurance coverage? Now you can do it all with one AI system. You can use

06:34your phone. And by the way, you can do this today in Abu Dhabi. We need to bring it to America.

06:41Senator Buck.

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