Yves here. We are taking the liberty of republishing a post by Gary Marcus, who has been one of a handful of AI experts to make early and accurate calls about the shortcoming of the technology, particularly of large language models. Marcus is urging voters to call their Congressional representatives to stop the White House plan to bar state regulation of AI. Please take up his warning and tell your legislators in no uncertain terms to oppose this “get out of jail free” card for powerful AI players who can and should be regulated just as other potentially hazardous consumer and business services are. Please also circulate this post to AI concerned or skeptical friends and colleagues.
There have already been many examples of chatbots encouraging suicide and violence even before getting to the harm that can come from garden variety inaccurate information.
By Gary Marcus, professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University. Originally published at his website
I write with some urgency.
Part I: Recent History
I warned here of a proposed Federal law, introduced by Congress, with the intention of cutting down the rights of individual states to regulate AI. Many other organizations spoke out as well.
At that point, there was a happy ending at the last minute. At the last minute Congress, led by Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn decided, essentially unanimously, to not enact such a monstrosity.
Good on them. A moratorium on Statewise regulation of AI was and is, a terrible idea, especially in a world in which there is no coherent Federal response to AI; children, in particular, are left incredibly vulnerable, to garbage like this:
As I put it in earlier today on X, re a call for federal AI standards in lieu of state standards only makes sense if there are (sensible) federal standards, but Congress has not put anything serious forward to a vote.
The actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt spoke eloquently about the same yesterday (full link here), referring a proposed last minute effort to stick a moratorium on statewise regulation into the National Defense Authorization Act:
Part II: Breaking news
But even in the last hours, the stakes have risen. I regret to inform you that, per an important scoop from The Information, The White House, clearly now tight with big tech, is preparing to circumvent Congress altogether:
Call your Congress people, ASAP; don’t let the White House cut them and the states you live in at the knees. I urge you in the strongest possible terms to follow the links that Joe Gordon-Levitt supplied at https://linktr.ee/StopTheAIBan, so that states can protect their citizens from the many dangers of AI, short-term and long. Airlines have regulations, cars have regulations, bakeries have regulations; AI bots that tell kids to kill themselves don’t.
We need to change that.
As if to prove the point, this from Wired magazine:
Nov 19, 2025 8:50 PM
Trump Takes Aim at State AI Laws in Draft Executive Order
The draft order, obtained by WIRED, instructs the US Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating AI.
https://www.wired.com/story/trump-prepares-executive-order-challenging-state-ai-laws/
I thought Republicans were in favor State rights, e.g., abortion.
guess we will see if AI oligarchs have bought as many congress critters as AIPAC – here in Michigan folks are pissed and worried about financial and environmental impact of data centers – in Saline the threat of a lawsuit by Oracle & others backing the project cowed the local municipality – DTE Energy wanted Michigan regulators to rush approval and tried an end-run around participation of the public by asking the Michigan Public Service Commission to forego public hearings and OK power contracts without formal scrutiny from outside groups like environmental and consumer advocates – that got shut down by the AG over the outcry and now they have a zoom meeting scheduled which the public can participate – an obvious fear of a truly public hearing –
https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/11/dte-asks-to-rush-approval-of-massive-data-center-deal-avoiding-hearings.html
https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/11/michigan-ag-seeks-to-pump-the-brakes-on-review-of-dte-data-center-deal.html
if y’all hit a paywall webpage archive works on these links –
but that hasn’t stopped folks turning out at ongoing local meetings of planning commissions –
https://www.mlive.com/environment/2025/11/northern-michigan-town-weighs-idea-of-large-data-center-on-state-land.html
https://archive.ph/2RAsJ
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08102025/los-alamos-university-of-michigan-national-security-data-center/
but given the manner the deal was pressured into being approved by the Saline council may indicate a plan that big business will use in the future – all it takes is a money-hungry land owner to team up with big business and let them do the heavy lifting intimidating a community by threatening their pocketbook with an expensive lawsuit with deep pocket big business – here are a couple more links from other sources about this power grab of states’ rights Drumpf –
WaPo – https://archive.ph/f3pCp
The Verge – https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/824608/trump-executive-order-ai-state-laws
there was a link a while back in NC about a company in upstate NY that wanted to use water from Lake Ontario and it was pointed out in comments that because the company was within a particular radius of the lake they had free use of the water from the Great Lakes based on a water treaty with Canada, IIRC – given the water hog these data centers are this may mean a gold rush to be within that radius –
They did this with 5G but at the state level, each state passing laws that local jurisdictions couldn’t restrict the 5G rollout.
And now they’re ripping out my copper landline…
>And now they’re ripping out my copper landline…
Seems like a decision made by a spreadsheet jockey.
That is something that baffles me as no matter how bad the storms were in the past it was almost a certain guarantee that the phones were working. One was able to check in on others to find out how they were holding up or needed anything. Now with it only being cell service for communicating, talk about being in the dark during weather catastrophes…
Thanks! Should have read this earlier, calls and letters first thing tomorrow.