TRANSCRIPT: Majority Leader Schumer Delivers Remarks Following The Conclusion Of The Inaugural Senate AI Insight Forum

Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) spoke today following the conclusion of the Senate’s inaugural AI Insight Forum, which he hosted along with Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD), and Senator Todd Young (R-IN). Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks:

It's been a very productive morning and afternoon.

We [previously] talked about the morning where it became clear that the panels have all different views, believe government had to act, that we needed government action on the transformative side to do all the great things that AI could do and do things also on the sustainability side so we could sustain AI without any great damages, and that there had to be some balance between the two.

In the afternoon, we’d always assumed we'd get a little more into detail still in the big questions, but into detail. And we discussed a whole bunch of issues, some of which were only touched on in the morning, some were a little deeper.

And the things we discussed were open AI and the pros and cons of that; health care, the amazing potential that AI could have in health care. [Senator] Mike [Rounds] talked about his own experience with his wife and many others and how it would be so great if AI could prevent that from happening with others.

We talked about election law and the need to do something fairly immediate before the election.

We talked about the displacement of workers, both the training of workers into the new AI jobs, but what do we do about displaced workers who might lose their jobs or have diminished jobs.

We talked about who the regulator should be. A lot of different questions about that.

We talked about the need for immigration.

We talked about transparency.

So the afternoon went just as well as the morning, in the sense that we got to delve more specifically into some of the other issues once we set the table.

One thing we know for sure: our work is just beginning. We need to have more of these forums and we need to get our committees working on different parts of legislation, because again, to not act is something we want to avoid.

We know it's going to be hard. We know it's not going to be easy. We know it's going to take bipartisanship and coming together and we know we're going to have to listen to diverse views.

But it is such an amazing potential, but also such an amazing challenge that it is really our obligation to do everything we can to come up with legislation that will make the world with AI a better place than it is today.

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