FRANKFORT, Ky. — As the growth of artificial intelligence technology continues, Kentucky leaders are eyeing strategies for continued oversight — and potentially new legislation to deal with it.
With lawmakers set to return to Frankfort for the upcoming 2025 legislative session, slated to begin on Jan. 7, 2025, an AI task force recently adopted what could be considered a list of legislative priorities.
Sen. Gex Williams (R–Verona) sits on the 11-member task force.
"The federal government is the best place to really effectively deal with AI," he said. "But there's other areas that, as a state, we have to agree we can work on right now."
Since July, the task force has met a handful of times in the interim, listening to testimony from several state agencies and leaders representing Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
"Throughout the past year, it's become more and more pervasive (in) our lives," said Nicholas Caporusso, an NKU associate professor of computing and analytics. "It's important to have people at the government level who think about the potential of AI and the risks."
The task force adopted the following 11 recommendations:
- Consider legislation that would provide policy standards for the utilization of Al by the state of Kentucky, which would include a framework for decision-making in ethical AI uses, the business cases for use, the approval process for use, disclosures in use, mitigating third-party risks in use, and ensure the data privacy of Kentucky citizens.
- Urge the federal government to take immediate action on the regulation of AI.
- Direct Legislative Research Commission (LRC) staff to provide a definition of AI for legislative purposes in Kentucky.
- Consider legislation that would promote and protect the integrity of Kentucky elections by encouraging the responsible use of Al as it relates to elections and the electoral process.
- Encourage the Kentucky Community & Technical College System (KCTCS), in conjunction with the Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE), to conduct a study into how educational opportunities and efforts relating to Al offered by employers can translate into postsecondary educational achievements and college degrees.
- Encourage the Kentucky Office of the Attorney General to investigate current healthcare-related regulations to determine whether sufficient guidelines are in place to protect patients from possible HIPAA violations.
- Encourage the Kentucky Office of the Attorney General to review laws related to individual likeness and continuously collaborate with the General Assembly on any issues resulting from Al advancements.
- Consider allowing a one-time allocation of funds toward centers that could be used by Kentucky institutions to promote responsible research, developments, and advancements in Al.
- Consider legislation that would promote the responsible use of Al by requiring certain disclosures when communicating with Al chatbots.
- Encourage all infrastructure providers to develop a long-term Al governance model that ensures the integrity of its data, safeguards proprietary and confidential information, ensures accountability for the acceptable use of Al products, and creates a framework for best practices that instills ethical and moral guidelines.
- Encourage the General Assembly to continue its support of policies that ensure utilities in the state of Kentucky possess the adequate generation and infrastructure required to meet the increasing energy demands.
Since the emerging technology comes in all shapes and forms, Williams said, it's important to create a statewide definition of AI to help lawmakers create laws surrounding it: "We're going to learn how, I think, to interact differently with technology. But we are not being eliminated as individuals from that chain."
"It's not going away. We are integrating it more and more into our lives, whether we want it or not," Caporusso said. "We're using systems that incorporate AI and that leverage AI for making our work better, for making our lives better. There's clearly a lot of detrimental potential with AI, as with any other kind of technology."
The list of recommendations has been sent to the LRC, which works as the administrative and research arm of the Kentucky General Assembly.
