Schumer announces bipartisan senator-only briefings on ‘astounding’ AI advances

A bipartisan group of senators announced on Tuesday a series of briefings focused on artificial intelligence, including the first ever classified “All-Senators” briefing on the topic.

“Dear Colleague: The advances we have seen in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the last few months have been astounding. From helping the paralyzed walk again to allowing anyone to be a computer programmer, the technological breakthroughs are happening on almost a daily basis,” Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote in a letter to his fellow senators this week.

“As AI transforms our world, the Senate must keep abreast of the extraordinary potential, and risks, AI presents.”

The letter, cosigned by Republican Senators Mike Rounds and Todd Young along with Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich, explained that over the course of the summer they will hold three bi-partisan senator-only briefings.

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The briefings will address the following questions:  Where is AI today? What is the frontier of AI, and how do we maintain American leadership?  How do the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community use AI today, and what do we know about how our adversaries are using AI?

The third meeting regarding the Department of Defense and the intelligence community will be a classified briefing.

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“The Senate must deepen our expertise in this pressing topic,” the senators stated. “AI is already changing our world, and experts have repeatedly told us that it will have a profound impact on everything from our national security to our classrooms to our workforce, including potentially significant job displacement.”

The hearings come amid a rise in concerns over artificial intelligence, a branch of computer science that is designed to understand and store human intelligence, mimic human capabilities, including the completion of tasks, process human language and perform speech recognition.

A recent study out of Australia recently concluded that humans are having a difficult time differentiating between real images and AI images, and hyperrealistic images generated by AI could lead to the proliferation of misinformation online and cybersecurity issues.

Additionally, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned last month that AI could become powerful enough to replace professional experts “in most domains” within the next decade.

Fox News’ Emma Colton contributed to this report