It’s a cold day on Capitol Hill when Republican Sen. Josh Hawley finds himself on the positive side of a headline. But as lawmakers on the left and the right have soured at the thought of artificial intelligence, the fight to hold these tech giants accountable amid an administration unwilling to do so has expanded past a partisan level.
In a letter addressed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Sens. Hawley and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) demanded answers for the declining state of classrooms as Google’s AI presence increases.
“We write with grave concern that Google’s aggressive push of A.I. products to children in schools is threatening the academic success and overall wellbeing of an entire generation,” the letter began.
Both the Democrat and Republican senators leaned on a Wall Street Journal investigation noting the deterioration of critical thinking and test scores.
In Google’s own research, according to the investigation, they found that the tech poses elevated risks to children, potentially leading to cognitive and emotional harm.
In response, the bipartisan letter requested information on “Google’s promotion of A.I. products in schools and details about the research it has conducted on potential harms to children’s educational and emotional development.”
Despite Republicans once being behind the charge for AI, many have changed their tune as data centers take up space on their electrical grids and fill the minds of their constituents.
Related | Trump can’t make ‘super intelligence’ happen
But if you ask President Donald Trump, all’s good and the U.S. should continue pushing what he’s deemed “super intelligence” forward. After all, he had the tech giants sign a “morally binding” letter promising not to destroy the world.
Even AI leaders are sounding the alarms on their own products, though.
Open AI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei warned the United Nations of the dangers behind the tech, urging them to make international AI standards. This, of course, only came after a number of suicides, calls of AI “psychosis,” and tech executives blatantly asking the U.S. government to find a way to put the “brakes” on their own creation if needed.
As it stands, though, the Trump administration is not as willing to look under the hood of these AI giants and slow what is already taking a hold of its users in and out of the classroom.
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