HARRISBURG — Attorney General Dave Sunday announced his office has joined a bipartisan coalition of 44 Attorneys General calling on Big Tech companies to provide stronger protections for children who are using their platforms and being exposed to artificial intelligence (A.I.) chatbots.
The letter — which is being sent to Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Open AI, Replika, and other companies — warns that harms caused to children, and others, by chatbot interactions will need to be answered for.
The letter articulates problematic interactions between users and chatbots (A.I. representations that have digital conversations with users), including sexualized conversations, discussions of violence, and deceiving users into scams.
“These companies are becoming extraordinarily wealthy while testing the limits of A.I. on their consumers, without concern for the harm they are causing kids and others in digital spaces,” Attorney General Sunday said. “I am deeply concerned that kids in Pennsylvania and nationwide are essentially serving as guinea pigs for Big Tech experiments. We have heard horror stories of children being encouraged to harm themself or others and children being exposed to explicit content by A.I. chatbots. Every child on the internet is potentially being exposed to this technology.”
The letter alleges that artificial intelligence companies are aware they may be exposing children to sexualized content and are choosing not to enact protections. If that same conduct was done by humans instead of a machine, it would be considered unlawful, or even criminal, the letter states.
The letter asks that these artificial intelligence companies “exercise judgement” when reviewing policies, especially when opportunities arise such as Meta had — and failed in — when it conceived the policy approving its A.I. to engage in sexualized conversations with minors.
Attorney General Sunday was joined in sending these letters by the Attorneys General from Illinois, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alaska, American Samoa, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawai’i, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Northern Mariana Islands, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
# # #