Comment by Alondra Nelson

The People-First Chatbot Act responds in a forceful way to the concerns many Americans rightly have about this powerful technology as generative AI has moved from novelty to infrastructure over the last four years. The bill's boldness rests on a careful foundation. It is built squarely on the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, produced after more than a year of public input and consensus-building across the federal government, academia, and industry, which has held up as a standard as the technology has become omnipresent. The legislation would bring the tools of both federal and state enforcement to protections that should not depend on either alone. And it would clearly articulate the value of human agency: Safe and Effective Systems; Algorithmic Discrimination Protections; Data Privacy; Notice and Explanation; and Human Alternatives, Consideration, and Fallback. Together these describe what it should feel like to live alongside this technology as a person with rights, rather than as a data point in someone else's model.