EVC Presents Testimony at AI Hearing at City Council
As part of the lengthy NY City Council Committee of the Whole hearing, Oversight - Examining the Risks Posed by Artificial Intelligence, held on Monday, October 5th, in which representatives for some of the country’s biggest AI companies participated, EVC’s Executive Director, Ambreen Qureshi, presented testimony on behalf of the Educational Video Center's young documentarians.
The hearing focused on several topics related to the misuse of A.I., including the creation of fake imagery and video of political figures aimed at misleading the public opinion and political participation.In her testimony, Qureshi stated that:
“Throughout history we’ve been able to rely on community members and the media to fact-check them and safeguard our political processes. But with AI, bad actors can now generate images and messaging so real and with such speed that it is nearly impossible to keep up. Such as Andrew Cuomo’s awful, and perhaps thankfully - poorly-made AI ads attacking then-Democratic Mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani.”
She also expressed EVC’s students' concerns regarding critical thinking and discerning the truth:
“With the emergence of artificial intelligence across all sectors of society, EVC’s young people are expressing increasing levels of anxiety about AI’s impacts on their mental health, their community wellbeing, their futures as job seekers and learners in public and advanced education, and, most concerning of all, their ability to discern what is real and what is not.”
Qureshi also noted that EVC youth have expressed their concerns in various documentaries, including “Beyond the Code” and this summer’s “False Reality,” in which students shared worries about AI’s erosion of their education and cognitive capacities, expressing that “AI can make young people not use their minds.”
What is EVC doing to face AI issues?
In response to our students’ concern and thanks to the City Council's Artificial Intelligence Community Education Initiative, EVC has begun offering AI literacy workshops, where young people learn how to use these deeply flawed tools whilst gaining the critical skills they need to begin to understand what works and what doesn’t about AI, who owns these tools and what their motives are for developing them, and how users can analyze and interrogate AI-generated content.
The testimony concluded by asking the City Council Committee, on behalf of EVC’s young people, “to protect our young people, safeguard our democracy, and prioritize mitigating the harms of AI through passage of legislation, Intro 0504.”
Read the complete testimony here:
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