I'm Paris Jackson in the Cascade PBS newsroom.

The tech industry is clashing with lawmakers as Olympia tries to rein in artificial intelligence technology during this year's legislative session.

Cascade PBS and KNKX reporter Nate Sanford has been tracking these bills.

There's several pretty big pieces of AI legislation moving through this year.

One really high profile one involves AI chat bots.

And this is something that Governor Bob Ferguson himself requested.

And it basically concerns chat bots and miners and worries about people's mental health.

So this would require that chat bots regularly remind users that they're talking to an AI and not a real human, and would also require some additional suicide prevention protocols.

Another bill that's moving forward has to do with deepfakes and basically requiring that developers make tools available so people can tell when something is generated by AI.

And there's also a bill involving giving people the rights to their digital AI generated likeness.

Nate says tech lobbyists have called these proposed regulations excessive.

The tech industry has been lobbying against a lot of these bills, arguing that they're too broad or it would be difficult to enforce.

They've been saying that some of the requirements wouldn't actually be technically feasible to implement.

But, you know, state lawmakers have been saying that, it's really time to rein in big tech and hold them accountable for these tools we're putting out there.

Nate says inaction at the federal level to regulate AI spurred a sense of urgency this session.

Senator Lisa Wellman was was telling me that with these bills she hopes to pass.

But part of the part of the point also in reducing them is just to kind of put big tech on notice, right, and raise awareness of these issues.

And the ones that didn't advance this year will, very likely be coming back in future sessions.

I'm Paris Jackson, thank you for watching The Newsfeed, your destination for nonprofit Northwest News.

Go to CasadePBS.org for more.