Rand Paul Loses The Plot: Says Gov’t Is Going To Use AI For Censorship

There are, certainly, all sorts of questions about what is generally referred to today as AI, and what it will do, and if it needs to be regulated, but it would help if we had law makers who had the slightest clue what they were talking about.

Senator Rand Paul is upset about AI and how it might lead to censorship. At first, after hearing this, I thought perhaps he was concerned about how potential problematic regulations of AI could violate the 1st Amendment in silencing speech created by users of AI tools. Or, perhaps, how bad regulations could infringe on the 1st Amendment rights of the companies who make AI tools.

But... no. While those are both legitimate concerns, Paul's concerns seem... disconnected from reality? It started with a statement during a hearing which already made no sense:

The government is using your hard-earned tax dollars to surveil and censor your protected speech. Artificial Intelligence is only going to make it easier for the government to do this and harder to detect," the lawmaker cautioned. This should not be a partisan issue. We must get to the bottom of how the federal government uses artificial intelligence to violate the privacy and civil liberties of the American people before it's too late."

I'm all for protecting the privacy and civil liberties of the American people, but I'm not at all clear what AI has to do with any of this.

Paul then went on a radio show to make things... even dumber.

So if the government decides to use artificial intelligence on Twitter or social media to look for certain phrases that they find to be disinformation' or the government doesn't like.

Let's say, for example, that I say COVID vaccines aren't really necessary for children that have already had COVID,' there's a lot of scientific evidence to back that up, but it's an opinion and you can have an alternative opinion. But what if those codewords are put into an algorithm? Artificial intelligence then trolls the internet and then the government takes down comments it doesn't like.

That's a real First Amendment problem.

So, um, yes, if the government were doing that, that would be a 1st Amendment problem. But it skips a whole lot of steps. First off, what he describes is not AI, it's filtering systems, and those have existed for years, and the US government has never used such filtering systems to take down comments it doesn't like."

The actual 1st Amendment issue is totally unrelated to the AI here. And, if the government were trolling the internet and taking down comments it didn't like, there clearly would be a 1st Amendment issue, which is why that doesn't happen. At most, what we've seen is that the government has sent notes to social media suggesting some content violates their policies, or they've criticized the companies' policies. But there has yet to be an example of the government taking down" content in a way that violates the 1st Amendment.

And... what does AI have to do with any of this? After seeing Paul's comments, I have no idea what he thinks AI does or how it works, because what he describes... is wholly unrelated to anything related to AI. If the government were censoring content on social media - which, again, it is not - then it's unclear how AI does literally anything to change that equation. It doesn't make it any more or less of a 1st Amendment problem. It... doesn't make any sense at all.

This is like saying we need to be concerned about mobile phones, because automobiles might run people over, and with mobile phones the government might use them to run people over." I mean, sure, it would be bad if the government ran people over, but they're not, and whether or not mobile phones are involved is irrelevant.

Once again, please, I beg of people: stop electing ignorant people.