Attorney General Andrea Campbell wants to protect Massachusetts residents from scams involving voice cloning, deepfake videos and other applications of artificially intelligent technology — and hold suppliers accountable for their products.
Campbell's office published an advisory this week clarifying that state consumer-protection, anti-discrimination and data security laws all apply to AI.
On Boston Public Radio Wednesday, she said that effort is unique among states, and encouraged people to contact her office if they feel they've been defrauded by AI.
“If it's a human being defrauding you or a system, both equally are seen the same under our laws in Massachusetts,” she said. “That actually, believe it or not, is breathtaking because no state across the country has made it crystal clear and in line with our federal government that that's the case.”
Campbell's advisory, directed at AI users, developers and suppliers, lays out some specific instances that would be deemed unfair or deceptive under state law, like falsely advertising an AI-powered system's functionality or tricking someone into supplying personal information “as if to a trusted business partner” by misrepresenting audio or video content of another person.
“If this is happening to you and you feel like you've been scammed or defrauded by either a person or a system of some sort, do reach out to our office,” Campbell said. “Do let us know. We want to be able to go after some of these folks to hold them accountable.”
On another data privacy issue, Campbell said her team has been advocating at the State House for lawmakers to pass a bill dubbed the Location Shield Act.
That bill, still stuck in the committee review process after a June 2023 hearing, would ban companies from selling cellphone location data and require them to get consent before collecting or processing an individual's location information.
“You assume that all the data of where you go to get your health care, your reproductive care, where your children go to school, all that is private,” she said. “It is not. Right now, you can take that information, sell it to a third-party broker, and they can do whatever they want with it, including showing up at, say, maybe some reproductive health care institutions here in Massachusetts and doing all types of things.”
Campbell said she's also in talks with lawmakers about a response to the financial crisis at Steward Health Care that has created questions around the future of Steward's eight Massachusetts hospitals and the patients they serve.
Calling the situation a public health crisis, Campbell said her office is looking to make sure medical providers at Steward facilities get paid properly and is taking part in talks with other state officials around preserving patients' access to care.
She said her office is having a longer-term conversation with lawmakers about how to prevent similar challenges involving other for-profit health care companies.
“That for-profit role in health care, absolutely a question that's on the table and has been for the office for a little bit, but that will require possibly some legislative changes to give us more authority over for-profit versus nonprofit, where we have significant authority in these types of health care transactions to bring about greater transparency, greater accountability,” she said.
