On Father’s Day, pondering the perils and possibilities of AI for the next generation
The ban on AI regulation proposed by the Big Beautiful Bill would give tech companies carte blanche to control how AI will shape our lives, decimating local journalism in the process.
From my office at the Martha’s Vineyard Times, I look out over a ramshackle waterfront and a long dock where a weathered American flag twists in a salty breeze coming in off of the Vineyard Haven harbor.
Out past the harbor and all the angst we all feel these days with the rising tensions in the Middle East, the unrest in Los Angeles, and President Trump’s obscene use of the American military’s 250th birthday to give himself a military parade for his own 79th birthday, I was looking ahead to the Father’s Day weekend, less focused on the news cycle and more concerned with having my sons home to help me paint our house.
I wanted to write a big, beautiful column, to borrow a phrase, about raising our four sons through COVID and Trump America, and how to help this uniquely challenged generation navigate these deeply polarized and uncertain times with their conscience, their souls and their sense of humor intact, along with their value for hard work. I’m incredibly proud of all four of my sons and the way they have struck out in the world with a compass setting that will guide them well. The true North is that they know how to work with their hands, and they know how to work hard.
The oldest of the four is a journalist who also works out on commercial fishing boats to pay the rent; the second son is a new hire in an investment firm in New York who has been using his experience as a former first mate on a charter fishing boat to research opportunities for investments; another is just coming out of college in the class of 2025 and setting out to use his skills in carpentry to work in historic preservation (right now he is using them to replace some rotted trim boards on a house we bought here back in 1993;) and the youngest is a rising junior in college but back at home for the summer working on an oyster dock. It is no surprise that they are filled with dread about the future of the country. Still, what I see in them and admire greatly is their ability, despite it all, to roll up their sleeves, put their heads down and work.
Over dinner, I was starting to cast a line to see what they thought about this idea of me writing about them for a Father’s Day piece. They looked at me sideways and wanted to be very clear that they thought it was a terrible idea. One issued an audible groan. They were uncomfortable being quoted and they just didn’t believe they had much to say.
My youngest son, Jack, still had the briny smell of the oyster dock after coming off of work in the late afternoon. He took a semester off from school last year to work as a field organizer for Kamala Harris in Michigan, and he is by far the most political of the four. He served as a White House intern and worked as a Senate page back in high school, and was the most impatient with his old man for even thinking about writing about being a Dad when so much is happening in the world. He was working me over and challenging me to take on the much bigger issues of the day.
He wanted me to sit down and read the so-called “One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” and start writing one particular angle that he felt was getting too little attention.
This is President Trump’s sweeping new bill which the House of Representatives recently voted to approve as part of the budget reconciliation process. This proposed legislation includes everything my sons, and most young people, are worried about for the country:
A flawed approach to cutting the staggering $36 trillion national debt which is likely to fail because it fails to gain more revenue, through a restructuring of taxes that favor the rich.
A misguided abandonment of tax incentives which are currently driving innovation in green technology and helping the country to tangibly address climate change.
The elimination of subsidized loans for college which each of our sons have relied on for tuition bills.
But the part of this bill that Jack wanted to direct my eyes to is a sleeper provision that it seems few people are paying attention to, which he believes will have fateful consequences if it passes.
That is the provision (sec. 43201(c)) which would impose a 10-year bar on state and local governments enforcing “any law or regulation” concerning artificial intelligence (AI). The provision does include an exemption for criminal law and some of the provision’s supporters claim it exempts “generally applicable law,” but this claim does not appear to be supported by either the text that passed the House or the earlier version that passed out of committee. This provision essentially gives big tech and AI platforms carte blanche to control how AI will shape our lives.
The proposed bill feels like a latter day Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which provided a legal shield for online platforms from liability for content posted by their users. This immunity protects online service providers from being treated as publishers or speakers of information provided by others. Essentially, it means that companies like Meta, Alphabet and X Corp aren't held responsible for the content posted by their users on Facebook, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter.) It effectively allowed them to take the content from news organizations, for example, that work hard to publish facts and use them in their algorithms without much of any consequence.
To its critics, Section 230 is the original sin of the Internet which allowed misinformation and disinformation to soak into the landscape of news across America, contributing to the financial crisis of local newspapers like the MV Times, where I serve as publisher, and the scores of other local newspapers that GroundTruth supported through Report for America. The real impact of Section 230 was to create a new media landscape in which two digital entities, Google and Facebook, controlled more than two-thirds of all digital advertising and that has everything to do with how newspapers fell into their steep decline.
So what will happen to a free press in the age of unregulated AI? For some, AI could provide an essential way to clean up the information commons through a quality control function, a future in which truth, discernible facts, have true value in the free market of information. Or, it could well fully connect the pipelines of toxic misinformation to the streams that feed the Large Language Models that drive AI.
Certain provisions of this bill seem to be like a Rorschach test which could be interpreted in different ways. The bill could in effect allow local news organizations to streamline the process through which licensing agreements with AI platforms could be structured that will compensate them for the content they create so that it is not scraped for free by AI platforms, cutting them out of the profit that will come through the content and archives they have created.
However, the more likely impact will be to give the AI platforms carte blanche to do as they will to scrape content without compensating those who created it. That, like Section 230, will likely weaken news organizations, empower AI platforms, and leave us all heading down a road that will continue to allow tech to profit from journalism, while eroding even further its business models. That is bad for a free press, and that is why I think we should all be studying up on this and make sure our representatives understand the peril it represents.
The irony of it all is that AI runs the risk of destroying the very industry that the LLMs will need to verify the content, and the data that AI companies use to train the models that provide us with answers when we use an AI platform, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or any other. If users can’t trust the answers they get from a service, they’ll ultimately abandon it.
This chain reaction will be bad for all of us who care about trusted information, who believe in shared sets of facts as the very foundation of how we will make decisions in our communities. AI platforms should care about that. If they haven’t yet realized it yet they should ponder this equation: if local journalism did not exist they would have to invent it.
What I mean by that is they should be working with local news organizations to verify the content they create, which will in turn ensure the accuracy of the data – also known as facts – that they use to feed the LLMs. It will be a lot more difficult to invent local nodes of verification of facts than it would be to support, and compensate fairly, those who are already doing it, such as local news organizations. And as a win-win, using these local newsrooms for this task could help to save them from the death spiral they are in.
This leaves us on a hinge of history that could either swing toward the Dark Ages of misinformation and polarization or toward a new Enlightenment - an age in which the truth has value and those who toil in the fields to gather the verifiable facts we need to confront the complex problems we face will be compensated for them and be able to sustain and even thrive.
What matters to my sons – and to me as their father – is the future that they will inherit. They see in the big beautiful bill a feeble attempt to confront the soaring national debt and because the old man is a journalist they also see a potential peril and a potential opportunity in the way this deregulation will shape AI and thereby our free press in the future, and determine how we find truth itself.
On a quiet, hazy Friday afternoon, a breeze was picking up over Vineyard Sound and that American flag at the end of the dock just out my window was left twisting in the wind. An image that seemed an apt metaphor for how the whole country feels about our democracy as we head into this weekend, where some will celebrate a wannabe king and the rest of us will reflect on and celebrate what it means to be a father.
Substack Live with Jeremy Caplan
Join us on Tuesday, June 17th, at 2:00 pm EST, for a live conversation with
, director of Teaching and Learning at CUNY's Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, on the potential consequences of the AI provisions included in Trump’s big beautiful bill, along with how journalists across the nation are using AI.Paid subscribers can email their questions to info@groundtruth.org.
Another truly important column -- and btw, wouldn't it be cool if our high schools taught these pieces of legislation in class -- provision by provision -- then the sometimes awful truth of them would be understood. Won't happen, but what a tool to learn how to be citizens of our precious democracy!
Christ, I really can’t see how anyone can be optimistic about that section about AI. Let’s say that these companies decide to have staff journalists that go out and do all the work and then feed their work to the horror machine. There is no writing anymore, no passion, no storytelling, just events. No art, no credit, just the machine, and I highly doubt any of them will be paid very much. In fact it’ll probably be an aggressive form of what’s already happening in journalism. A race to the bottom in terms of quality and wages started by the bosses who do not care about their staff and completed by an apathetic population. I mean, am I wrong here? Compromise does not work here because the compromise requires the LLM to eat you slightly less than it already would’ve. Is there even any point to journalism after this? Will anyone even notice us gone?