When protecting their people, lawmakers might also consider the value of their own time.

Capitol News Illinois’ Maggie Dougherty has an excellent report on the roiling tensions between state legislatures and the White House over technology industry regulations (tinyurl.com/AIstandoff). Since the 250-year-old struggle between state’s rights and federalism is too dense a topic for this particular space, it’s instead worth considering the General Assembly’s ideas about artificial intelligence in the context of another relatively recent law that tried to thread the needle between corporate interests, citizen protection while also accounting for federal authority: the Biometric Information Privacy Act.

After lawmakers enacted BIPA in 2008, a flurry of lawsuits followed, each forcing judges (including those on the federal bench), appeals panels and the Illinois Supreme Court to address a wide range of questions the statute left unanswered. Some of it was old hat, like parsing the distinction between negligence and the more serious reckless or intentional conduct, or determining the legal definition of “a health care setting.”

What often seemed uncomplicated at first – workers said their employer didn’t collect informed written consent before making them use fingerprints for a time clock scanner, locked cabinet or point-of-sale terminal – grew into a major concern when some judges ruled each successive thumb tap was a violation punishable by a fine.

That boondoggle eventually led to Senate Bill 2979, passed in the spring of 2024, a bipartisan clarification that improper collection of data is the fineable offense. As I wrote that November, “Had the original drafters written the law better, we might’ve been spared a decade of trial lawyers, judges and business defendants haggling over whether consequences were indeed unintended. Rather than concede that all those parties simply couldn’t understand legislators’ goals, reformers prevailed by convincing enough folks the original BIPA wasn’t fully baked.”

As with facial scans and voice recognition, technology falling under the blanket descriptor of “artificial intelligence” is advancing far more rapidly that any legislation could hope to match. But that’s precisely why the General Assembly needs to be diligent: rushing more purportedly protective laws onto the books invites recurrence of the same sorts of problems BIPA delivered.

“Illinois won’t back down,” said Rep. Bob Morgan, D-Deerfield, in an email to CNI. “We have both a constitutional right and a moral obligation to regulate artificial intelligence in health care, public safety and beyond.”

It’s possible to agree with that larger point while also urging continued caution. From here, the issue is less what lawmakers choose to regulate and more that they write into the first draft of their bills everything they actually intend to be the law of the land and not leave things up to trial lawyers and judges to interpret.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.