Alaska is falling behind most of the country on artificial intelligence governance. While other states have spent the past two years building legal and ethical guardrails around AI — protecting children, consumers and workers from harm, requiring transparency in algorithmic decisions and confronting the risks of deepfakes and disinformation — Alaska has moved on almost none of it. The gap shows up in how machines talk to our children, how our personal data gets used, how privacy and surveillance affect us and how high-tech giants make decisions about our lives.
Some states now require companion chatbots to disclose that they aren’t human or therapists, watch for signs of suicidal thinking and block sexual content from reaching minors. Alaska has no equivalent chatbot-specific law. Lawmakers did act on a related front this year: House Bill 47’s provisions criminalizing AI-generated child sexual abuse material and deepfake harassment passed as part of an omnibus crime bill and became law this June. While HB 47 is proof that the state can regulate AI harms when it chooses to, it’s a narrow step, not a substitute for the broader framework Alaska still lacks.
Consider algorithmic bias. When software helps decide who gets a loan, who gets watched, who gets a job interview or who gets an apartment, a growing number of states now require basic fairness and transparency in that process. Alaska has never attempted anything comparable. There’s no requirement here that an algorithm screening a job or benefits application be explainable, auditable or even disclosed to the person it affects
Then there’s disinformation. With AI-generated deepfakes now a fixture of political campaigns, roughly 30 states have passed election-related deepfake disclosure laws ahead of this year’s midterms, and dozens more have criminalized AI-generated nonconsensual intimate imagery. A fabricated video of an Alaska candidate or a fabricated image of an Alaska teenager could still circulate here with fewer legal consequences than in most of the country, even with this year’s narrow CSAM and deepfake harassment fix.
Alaska did try, briefly, to get ahead of this more broadly. House Concurrent Resolution 3 would have created a task force to study AI in Alaska and recommend how the state should approach its use in government, education and everyday life — including the privacy, surveillance, bias, child and consumer protection, and misinformation risks above. That effort stalled, but the need it was meant to address has only grown
Rather than letting the intent behind HCR 3 fade away, the focus should shift to establishing the research capacity that the resolution originally lacked. This perspective drives a new proposal presented to the University of Alaska Fairbanks titled “AI, Data Infrastructure, and Society in Alaska,” which was created by concerned residents with both lawmakers and key stakeholders in mind
Rather than a task force limited to a handful of legislators, the proposal envisions a graduate-level research program incorporating computer science, public policy, philosophy and ethics, data centers and science, which would pursue HCR 3’s original goals
AI and data centers need to be researched and governed together, not as separate questions. HCR 3 itself called for research and discussion of data centers alongside AI, recognizing that link. The two are inextricably related: Each drives the other in a feedback loop in which growing AI use fuels demand for more data centers, and every new data center adds the computing capacity that fuels further AI growth. Data centers are also where AI’s impact becomes physical and local — the electricity draw on grids, water use, land and community effects — so a policy that addresses AI without addressing the infrastructure it runs on covers only half the problem. Any Alaska framework that takes AI seriously has to treat AI and data centers as one system.
The ultra-rich tech giants are essentially making AI policy now, without us. If you think Alaska should have a say in that — rather than leaving it to Silicon Valley, Sacramento or the current administration — tell your legislator. Ask them to revive HCR 3’s task force with real teeth and to support the University of Alaska Fairbanks proposal that would give it the research backbone it needs. Alaska should not be the last state at the table
Roger Kayeis a freelance writer based in Fairbanks and the author of “Last Great Wilderness: The Campaign to Establish the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”
• • •
The Anchorage Daily News welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, emailcommentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words toletters@adn.comorclick here to submitmmentarieshere
