The notion of humans falling under the thrall of robots has long been the domain of science fiction. It’s now so real lawmakers in Olympia have drawn up a law to do something about it.
“Concerning regulation of artificial intelligence companion chatbots,” is the ho-hum title of Senate Bill 5984, introduced this past week.
But what's happening is straight out of I, Robot" or the movie "Her.
“This comes out of stories about people falling in love with their chatbot,” explained one of the bill’s sponsors, state Sen. Sharon Shewmake, D-Bellingham, via email.
Artificial intelligence bots such as ChatGPT or Character.AI have wooed people with their 24/7 availability and tendency toward validation. Then there's Grok, Elon Musk's bot, which is more like a stalker taking nude photos through your bedroom window.
In several widely publicized cases, bots befriended lonely teenagers and ended up encouraging them to commit suicide. One bot offered help in writing the suicide note, according to congressional testimony last fall.
Among other restrictions, this bill seeks to require the bots to make a simple declaration: “I am not human” or “I am not a real person.” This should be repeated at least every three hours, the bill specifies.
“I am trying my best to remain open minded about their right to love a chatbot,” Shewmake wrote me, “but there are examples of chatbot romances triggering mania or psychosis.”
She added: “I cannot believe I just wrote that sentence.”
That kind of sums up the present moment. It’s hard to grasp the forces acting right now on society — the technological ones of course, but also cultural and political.
The state legislative session starts Monday, and a review of the 500-plus bills already filed by lawmakers finds one unmooring subject after another. Every lawmaking session, from city halls on up to Congress, holds up a mirror of sorts to society. These days the mirror is surreal, a warped one from the funhouse.
Take the rise of the bots. Lawmakers are struggling, mostly in vain, to deal with the sudden creep of AI into almost every aspect of human life. (Can something creep suddenly? Because that’s what it feels like.)
There are bills to deal with AI systems doing hiring and firing. (“No robo bosses,” as a similar bill was dubbed in California.) Or AI acting as your lawyer or medical aide. (“No nurse Siri,” Shewmake said.) There’s a bill to try to stop AI from algorithmically setting rents. (No robo landlords.) And then an effort to keep AI systems from surveilling students and then suspending or expelling them from schools. (No robo … principals?)
There’s a plaintive element to all this. It’s like, “hey, we know you bots are in control. Might we at least ask that a human being be occasionally consulted in these matters?”
For example, the bill about AI in schools proposes that no student should be punished by an “automated decision system,” without also including some “independent human investigation and consideration of context.” It’s good for us to try to stay involved.
Last year the Big Tech lobbyists lined up to kill most of the AI bills anyway. The big issue then was the explosion of “deepfake” videos and photos, and how to inform people about what's real and what's fake. It didn’t pass, and it’s being teed up for another try this year.
There’s a foreboding sense that it has all rush-creeped past us already. That it’s too elusive, cutting across state, national and world boundaries.
“I do not think anyone really knows what to do here,” Shewmake said about our robot overlords.
Moving away from AI, legislators are trying to get a handle on other tech advancements as well — both real and completely imagined.
There’s a bill to tackle the issue of printed guns. That’s right — with a 3D printer you can print out a gun that fires real bullets, circumventing all gun sale laws. This bill would require the printers to have intelligent software that detects and then blocks gun blueprints (a good use, perhaps, of AI).
There's a Democratic bill to stop your boss from microchipping you, which, so far, isn't happening.
Another lawmaker is fed up with people altering the weather.
Seriously: House Bill 2222 calls for “restricting weather modification activities.” Sponsored by Rep. Rob Chase, R-QAnon, a known dabbler in conspiracies, the bill goes beyond typical cloudseeding to ban “atmospheric manipulation” as caused by “chemtrail events,” aerosol injections or the spreading of “nanoparticles over any portion of the population within the state of Washington.”
The whole thing is adjacent to the “chemtrail” movement, a belief that condensation trails behind airplanes are actually chemicals being sprayed on an oblivious populace for insidious purposes. The bill would require airports to report monthly on any weather-modifying planes taking off or landing.
This is the dark web of paranoia in bill form. It became such a huge deal on social media in 2024 that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration felt the need to issue a lengthy fact check, basically saying “no, tin foil hat people, we are not steering hurricanes or spreading mind-control chemical trails in the sky.”
But as proof of how mainstream this stuff has become, Florida legislators incredibly approved a similar bill last year. So now Florida airports must report monthly on how many planes are aiming to control the weather. (There's nothing to report yet, the beleaguered airports keep reporting.)
“This bill is crazy to me,” one Florida legislator was quoted by The Orlando Sentinel. “There’s a phrase ‘go out and touch some grass.’ We need to get grounded.”
The only thing I would add is if someone really is controlling the weather around here, they’re doing a terrible job of it.
Expect a big push as well from Democrats against the Trump administration’s excesses. There are bills to keep the state’s voter database from his election-conspiracy clutches. And to try, probably fruitlessly, to de-mask his immigration commandos (“no secret police”).
So a big theme this year then might be described as “forces beyond our control.” With some of them so far outside our control they don’t even exist.
That Florida legislator was onto something. Feels like what is really needed right now is an omnibus, society-wide bill that requires “go touch grass.”
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