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President Biden is the first president to deal with the opportunities and challenges that come with the growth of artificial intelligence. He was actually the first president to mention artificial intelligence in a State of the Union address. As Biden's time in the White House comes to a close, NPR White House correspondent Deepa Shivaram takes a look at his legacy on AI.
DEEPA SHIVARAM, BYLINE: When President Biden got his first look at ChatGPT in 2023, it was around the same time the rest of the country was getting a sense of what generative AI could do. It was helping people get answers to questions, write lyrics to songs and create digital art. Its potential in healthcare and other industries seemed immense. But so did the risks, like with deepfakes.
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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: With AI, fraudsters can take three-second - and you all know this - three-second recording of your voice. I've watched one of me a couple times.
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BIDEN: I said, when the hell did I say that?
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SHIVARAM: That was President Biden last year, talking about a deepfake video of himself saying things that he never actually said. Innovation in AI has boomed during Biden's presidency, and it became one of the more unique challenges he faced while in office.
ALONDRA NELSON: There were so many AI kind of milestones in this presidency.
SHIVARAM: That's Alondra Nelson, who served as the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology. She oversaw early efforts to develop a blueprint to take on the threats and benefits of this technology. After ChatGPT came out, she says the administration was under pressure and moved fast. Biden's series of actions on AI all came out within about six months. It was much faster than how the government has responded to Big Tech in the past.
NELSON: While it is true that government is never going to move as quickly as a Silicon Valley start-up, I think one of the Biden administration legacies around AI is that government can move much more quickly and did move much more quickly to be responsive.
SHIVARAM: First, the White House had major tech companies like Google and Meta agree to voluntary commitments, like committing to fighting against discrimination in the technology and adding watermarks so people can tell when something is made by AI. Vice President Harris also hosted roundtables about the technology with civil rights leaders and labor leaders. Then Biden signed a sweeping executive order. It set up standards for how federal agencies could use AI in everything from weather tracking to education. The order also has some teeth. It requires tech companies developing AI to share some of their testing results and data with the government. Here's Biden again the day he signed the executive order.
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BIDEN: We're going to see more technological change in the next 10, maybe next five years than we've seen in the last 50 years, and that's a fact. As the most consequential technology of our time, artificial intelligence is accelerating that change. It's going to accelerate it at warp speed.
SHIVARAM: Whether the steps the Biden administration took on AI will remain in the next Trump administration is unclear. Experts like Nelson are looking out for what changes Trump and his advisors from Silicon Valley would make and how cooperative Trump will want to be with other countries. In the meantime, it's Congress that will need to act in order for the U.S. to pass any kind of regulations on AI and technology companies. It's action that lawmakers from both parties have expressed interest in, but despite the technology developing at a rapid Silicon Valley-type pace, Congress is still moving at a Washington pace. So any major moves in AI legislation will likely take a lot more time. Deepa Shivaram, NPR News, Washington.
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