What role could artificial intelligence play in Oklahoma government? What the experts say

Like their counterparts in other states, Oklahoma lawmakers aren’t sure what to do with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence.

At least not yet.

On Monday, members of the Senate’s Business and Commerce Committee held the second of two joint interim hearings this fall focused on artificial intelligence and its effect on the state. The Senate's two-hour meeting explored the issues surrounding artificial intelligence.

Sen. Bill Coleman, the Business and Commerce committee chair, said the study of AI was vital to the state. “If you want to know just how important this interim study is, just imagine your chair up here can record any of your voices in 20 seconds and make you say anything and everyone will believe it’s you,” Coleman, R-Ponca City, said.

Herb Lin, a Hoover Institute Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security, told lawmakers the history and development of AI. Artificial intelligence technology, he said, was a foundational technology that is advancing other scientific fields and has the potential to transform how society operates, much like electricity and the internet.

At the same time, he said, “even the most advanced AI today — and for the foreseeable future — has failed modes that are unpredictable, not widely appreciated, not easily fixed and not explainable.”

Those failures, Lin said, can lead to unintended consequences if policy makers aren’t aware of them.

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“AI is a tool that has to be used judiciously. Its output can be helpful, but you really have to be skeptical at the same time,” Lin said. “It has the potential to make the lousy parts of human jobs more bearable easier to do, thereby freeing up humans to do things that people are best at doing. That’s the most positive thing to be said.”

But whether or not that happens, he said, is up policy makers to mitigate the bad outcomes.

Lin also urged lawmakers to “be weary of AI snake oil.”

“I have been through many AI winters for many years, and it has always been the case that the promises have been grand and the realization not so grand — maybe this time will be different, we’ll see,” he said.

Sean Alexander, a technology consultant from Tulsa, said most AI technology is a suite of tools that use massive amounts of data, massive amounts of computing and is coupled with algorithms. Alexander said technology companies were collecting so much data that today about 1.4 megabytes of data was generated every second for every person on the globe.

Like Lin, Alexander also pointed to the negatives of AI. “Right now, there is a space race between business and bad actors over AI,” he said.

How does AI fit into Oklahoma governmental policy?

Bill McIntosh, the chief information officer for the Office of Management and Enterprise Services, said the state’s goal was not to avoid AI but to develop a responsible way to use it. “The goal is to make sure AI operates in safe and secure manner,” he said. “We need to develop boundaries and guardrails on how it will be used.”

Monday’s meeting followed one held last week by state Reps. Arturo Alonso-Sandoval, D-Oklahoma City, and Daniel Pae, R-Lawton. Like the Senate’s meeting, the House’s study featured experts who spoke about the impact of AI on the state’s economy, job market and workforce development and other ethical, legal and societal implications of AI implementation.

"Moore's Law underscores the exponential pace of technological advancement, a phenomenon that poses challenges for us, particularly in the realm of public policy," Alonso-Sandoval said. "In light of the recent proliferation of AI technologies to the general public, it becomes imperative to grasp how this multifaceted technology, spanning areas such as generative AI and facial recognition, will reshape our communities' interactions with the world. These developments present an array of opportunities and challenges.

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Pae said policies about artificial intelligence would be “one of the most important policy issues we address as lawmakers in the 21st century.”

"This technology is going to profoundly change how we live, so we need to be proactive in terms of what parameters are placed around it,” he said.

Gov. Kevin Stitt creates task force to study uses, security vulnerabilities of AI

The hearings come less than a month after Gov. Kevin Stitt created a task force to “study the potential uses, benefits and security vulnerabilities of artificial intelligence and generative artificial intelligence.”

Stitt called the study group a major step toward his goal of modernizing and streamlining state government to make sure it works better for all Oklahomans.

“AI has the potential to revolutionize the way our society operates,” the governor said about the taskforce. “The private sector is already finding ways to use it to increase efficiency. Potential exists for the government to use AI to root out inefficiencies and duplicate regulations, and it is an essential piece of developing a workforce that can compete on a global level.”

While the governor sees AI as a possible benefit to the state, Attorney General Gentner Drummond isn’t so sure. In September, Drummond signed a letter from the rest of the nation’s attorneys general that urged Congress to study the impact of artificial intelligence on child pornography.

"While internet crimes against children are already being actively prosecuted, we are concerned that AI is creating a new frontier for abuse that makes such prosecution more difficult,” Drummond wrote.

Drummond said one of the issues troubling prosecutors is a possible defense loophole — claiming or indicating that AI-generated child pornography does not have a real victim. Drummond countered that “in many cases real children are edited into exploitive photographs but depicted in positions or circumstances which did not exist.”

“If there was never a child being exploited, but yet, there’s an image of a child being exploited – that’s the gap that we have to close through legislation," he said.

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Drummond also called on state lawmakers to address the issue.

Still, others say AI can be used for good, such as tracking diseases. At Oklahoma State University, Lucas Stolerman, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, used AI to develop a real-time warning system that anticipated COVID-19 outbreaks in the United States.

“To this end, we created a machine learning based early warning system leveraging internet-based digital data," Stolerman said.

University officials said Stolerman’s research resulted in machine learning methods that leverage internet-based digital traces to anticipate sharp increases in COVID-19 activity in U.S. counties.

“Whether using artificial intelligence to investigate and predict the spread of diseases or adapting advanced computational techniques to tackle relevant questions in biology, Dr. Stolerman’s research shows the wide applicability of mathematics and its deep connections with other sciences,” said Jay Schwieg, head of the Department of Mathematics.

While lawmakers offered no indication Monday of what policy would be sparked by the hearing, state Rep. Jeff Boatman, one of the lawmakers behind the study, said the work on AI would continue.

"I think it's clear that AI is going to be part of our future. It's not whether it's good or bad — it's here," What are we going to do with it to make it good our bad," he said.

Boatman, R-Tulsa, said he was cautious when it came to regulating the private sector. "We tend to get ahead of ourselves sometimes. We need enough of that normal kind of intelligence before we start messing with the artificial kind," he said. "We need to take a step back and be thoughtful about how we approach this and when we approach this. When do we let the private sector lead and when do we need to step in? It's not going to be an easy task."

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Could AI play a role in the government? What experts say in Oklahoma