Access to Democracy
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Access to Democracy
Erin Maye Quade
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State Senator Erin Maye Quade is the principal author of a new Minnesota law, the first in the nation, banning the use of artificial intelligence to create nude images of children. The law, which took effect August 1, is being challenged in federal court by Elon Musk. Erin joins host Steve Francisco to discuss the new law and why it has attracted overwhelming bipartisan support in our closely-divided Legislature. She also explains why she is working to pass her Child Social Media Safety Bill that would require children to have parental consent before opening social media accounts. The senator is also working to limit how health insurers can use AI in reviewing claims and requests for approval of doctor-recommended procedures. Finally, the interview discusses the controversial use of Flock surveillance cameras and concerns about the building of AI data centers.
Thank you for joining us today. Welcome to Access to Democracy. I'm your host, Steve Francisco. Our program is made possible by our sponsors, True Stone Financial, the Sheridan and Dulas Law Firm, the 45th Parallel Distillery, and Recalibra Health. Thank you for joining us. We have as our guest today Minnesota State Senator Aaron May Quaid. Senator Quaid, welcome to Access to Democracy.
SPEAKER_02Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_03And this is your first appearance on our program, so that makes it even more special today. So tell us a little bit about your background in politics. What did you do before you were elected to the Minnesota Senate?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so I was in the Minnesota House from 2016 to 2018. And then I ran in the gubernatorial primary in 2018. After that, I joined a nonprofit called Gender Justice. We work on all things related to gender equity, whether that's the wage gap or pregnancy and pumping discrimination to LGBTQ rights or reproductive health rights and justice. And I still work there because we're a part-time legislature, so I work there part-time too. And then I joined the Senate. I ran in 2022, and I'm in just finishing my first term.
SPEAKER_03Very good. And we should mention, too, that you're also a former congressional staffer, as I was. You worked for former Congressman Keith Ellison, now our attorney general.
SPEAKER_02Who do you work for?
SPEAKER_03Bruce Vento in the Minnesota House was a former teacher of mine way back when. But you were uh you have really carved out a niche in the Minnesota legislature as a champion for privacy rights and particularly issues surrounding artificial intelligence, which every day that we turn on the news, we're hearing more and more stories about how AI is changing our lives. Tell us how did you become interested in this issue of artificial intelligence and the need for regulation?
SPEAKER_02You know, it really started as uh interest in regulating social media companies. And AI is broadly controlled by the same companies, the same billionaires that do social media. But just watching, I'm a millennial, I'm an elder millennial, um, and watching the ways in which unregulated social media, unregulated big tech just kind of has run roughshod over society, over kindness, over democracy, and then watching that be supercharged with AI. I remember having this moment thinking, or I've had these moments thinking, if I had been an adult when social media came out, if I had been elected, I would have done all of these things. And when AI came out, I was like, well, here I am, I'm elected, I'm the adult, and I can do something. And so that's really what started it. I could see very clearly that we were going to need the same regulations that we should have for social media.
SPEAKER_03And particularly earlier this year, actually for the past two years, you were the lead Senate sponsor on a bill which passed the Minnesota House, passed the Senate, was signed into law by Governor Walsh, I believe it was May 7th this year, banning the creation of nude images or so-called nudification of children.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Tell us about that bill, why it was necessary, and and what does it do?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So the nudification technology ban came to me via some victim survivors who were nudified by a friend of theirs, a close friend. They'd been in his wedding, he'd been their roommate, their husbands had been best friends with him for 20 years, and he had taken wedding photos and personal family photos and created nudified images of more than 80 Minnesota women. Without their knowledge, without their knowledge, they found out from um his wife, his ex-wife. And they went to the police, and the police said, well, technically he didn't commit a crime because the only thing that was illegal in Minnesota at the time was the dissemination of nudified images. And so we realize in that moment that dissemination is not the harm, creation is the harm. And so the nudification technology ban goes upstream and it says nudification technology is cannot be distributed in the state of Minnesota or be made available to any Minnesotan so that no nudified images can be made in the first place.
SPEAKER_03And as hard as it is for people to get their head around this, there are people who have actually used this technology with children. Yes. Taking images of children and creating nude images of children using this AI technology or AI tool, if you will. Um, and that was a huge motivation behind your desire to want to do something to stop this, right?
SPEAKER_02Yes, I mean I think the thing people should understand is that nudification technology is available to any person with a cell phone. It can be done in seconds, and all you need is a photo. So keeping your kids offline, for example, or keeping yourself offline is not going to protect you. Someone could take a picture of your child at the grocery store, at the park, sitting in church or at a lynx game and turn them into child sexual abuse material. They could take, you know, photos of us off of this program right now and turn us into very hyper-realistic, believable pornography. And so that kind of harm, that kind of risk uh to people's privacy, just living public daily life, is completely unacceptable. And it doesn't need to be allowed. It's an ingredient that these tech billionaires have added into their algorithm that doesn't need to be there. And so we banned this uh notification ingredient, I should say, because the apps that do this, right, they do other things like turn your hair purple or put you in front of a lot of people.
SPEAKER_03Correct.
SPEAKER_02And those images aren't banned and those apps aren't banned, right? It's just the notification part. And most tech companies, right, Chat GPT or Claude or Meta, they don't do this. If you ask them to notify someone, it won't do it. And so there are a very select few companies that have built their business model around making money off of the creation of child sex.
SPEAKER_03Through apps or bots or other things that they can do. And this new bill, new law, which you were the author of, uh, we mentioned it was signed by the governor in May, became effective just recently, August 1st.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_03Very interestingly, the tech companies are now suing the state of Minnesota to prevent the enforcement of this new law which you authored. Um tell us about uh why they are challenging this law, what their argument is. I believe it has something to do with an argument about free speech and the First Amendment. But tell us in your words, what is the motivation behind their challenge and how do you think this court case will turn out?
SPEAKER_02So I want to be really clear. Um, tech companies aren't suing the state of Minnesota. Elon Musk's company is suing the state of Minnesota.
SPEAKER_03Clarification, thank you.
SPEAKER_02I, you know, it should be well said that all of the other tech companies are not suing Minnesota because, again, their business models aren't built off of the musk. And so um, you know, he the and I want to also be clear, this bill passed through the Minnesota Senate in 2025, and then it passed through the House in 2026. So not only did Elon Musk have two years to to register his displeasure or send a letter saying, hey, I think this would violate the law, he waited until three days before the law was set to take effect, months after it was signed into law, to register a complaint.
SPEAKER_03So he never opposed it before, never testified, submitted written testimony to legislature. Nope. Nothing.
SPEAKER_02And technet, which is the tech industry's lobbying arm. So it's every, you know, it's Amazon, it's Google, it's Apple, it's Meta, it's you know, it's all of them. Um they also didn't testify in opposition. We worked with them pretty closely to get uh uh an exemption so that Photoshop, um, because that takes technical skill, and I would consider that art, even if it's art I wouldn't like. Um so that is exempted, and we worked really closely with them to make sure that we were targeting the specific conduct we were looking for and not nothing else. And so Elon Musk is suing because his business model is built off of distributing child sexual abuse material and profiteering. Yes, yes, and and image-based sexual abuse.
SPEAKER_03And really making children the victims of this or adults where this is done without their knowledge or their consent.
SPEAKER_02Can I tell you that the day that uh Elon Musk filed this lawsuit against Minnesota was the same day that three separate lawsuits were filed against XAI for this very behavior? A group of girls in Arkansas filed a class action, a different girl in a different state who is they're all minors, they're all children, they were notified by Grok, and then a lawmaker in the UK. Grok made a video that showed her being chloroformed and prepared to be sexually assaulted, and this happened after she criticized Elon Musk. So that is ironic that his lawyers had time that day to file lawsuits when they were fielding off so many other lawsuits for the same behavior.
SPEAKER_03That's really terrible, unbelievable. And this case right now is pending in U.S. federal court, as I understand it correct. And there's been a hearing, the judge has not made a decision. Do we have any idea when a decision may come down?
SPEAKER_02So on Monday, August 24th, uh he will say when he's gonna make his decision. Um so we did have oral arguments on Wednesday. You asked what Elon Musk's argument is, and it is about speech, but really it's about money. Um, because nudification technology is an ingredient and a tool, it's an automated function. It's not the expression of anything, um, which is what art is, it's expressive. Right. And so uh I think it's a very flimsy argument, and I think you know, we passed this law 200 to 1.
SPEAKER_03I was gonna bring that up. Um I think one of the more remarkable things about this going from the process of you writing this bill to the governor signing it into law is the very broad, yes, almost unanimous bipartisan support for this bill. Why do you think that is? Why did that happen? It seems that we hear so much about the issues where DFLers and Republicans could not come to agreement in the legislature. This one stands out as a huge exception. Why is that so?
SPEAKER_02I think that there is something pretty unifying about the idea that against your will, against your consent, and at any moment because you're out in public, you could be turned into non-consensual sexual material or have your children be turned into child sexual abuse material. Um, that's very unifying. And I think you you find that across parties both in the legislature and outside of the legislature. Um, this is work, you know, whether it's regulating social media or big tech AI, um, it is very bipartisan, and I think that's very important because the harms have been bipartisan. And you see that over and over again.
SPEAKER_03And Aaron, do I understand correctly that Minnesota is the first state in the country? You are the author of the first bill to become law that does this banning nutrification.
SPEAKER_02First state in the country, certainly not the last.
SPEAKER_03What are some of the other states that you've heard of that are moving to do similar things?
SPEAKER_02So there's uh a dozen at least, but I don't want to jump in front because they're they're working on it. But it's red, purple, and blue states. It's Republicans, it's Democrats. Um, you know, I I could give you flavors, right? Any anyone from a type of state like Utah to Massachusetts as maybe as far as logo.
SPEAKER_03That pretty well spans the political ideological range, doesn't it? Yeah. Very interesting. You are also the sponsor of legislation, child social media safety bill. I believe that's a separate bill from this one, right? It is, yeah. Tell us about that. What is the child social media safety bill? What does it do?
SPEAKER_02So, first, it requires that social media companies create um child accounts, so for children 15 years of age and under, um, and that on those accounts there can be no infinite scroll, no notifications, likes, um, all of the addictive features that exist on social media, that they can't collect the data of those children uh when they have the child account, nor can they collect it to use later when those children have adult accounts. Um, and then there's settings that are available uh for the parents to set. It's not on like uh, you know, what kind of content, but limits, times that parents are are allowed to set. And these have to be uh on by default on child accounts. So it's really requiring these social media companies to take seriously the health and well-being of children. I will say it's interesting that now that we've passed this law, you see Meta out there being like, we have some safe teen accounts. And it's like, you could have had these the whole time, but you made us pass a law. And they make every state do it, state by state. There's a number of states who have bills similar to this one, and the first state that passed it, the tech companies could have said, all right, we'll just do this in every state. But no, they make us fight state by state by state to get these protections.
SPEAKER_03I'm really glad you brought that point up because I want to ask you about that. Because the AI crosses not just state lines, but international lines, the internet is global. Social media sites are global.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Um why has Congress and the federal government, do you think, failed thus far to be more proactive on this issue?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'm gonna give a maybe a three-part reason. The first, I think, is you cannot ignore the age. The average age of Congress is quite old. And so this didn't, this is social media isn't something that they were raised with. It's something that happened well into their adult life. Um, you've seen some of the hearings on Hit the Hill where they're like, my email is, you know, it's a little out there. Um the second is, you know, you saw at Donald Trump's inauguration all the tech billionaires sitting right behind him, right? So you can't ignore the capture uh in DC that these incredibly wealthy people have. And the third is that they are successful enough to conflate uh for the regular consumer, right? So this happens with data centers. It's like, well, you use a cell phone, you need a data center. And it's like, I've been using a cell phone since 1997, and I didn't need it. Right, right. Or you need this because of all the AI you use, but we forced you to use it because it's on your phone and you don't have a way to opt out. So I think it's those three parts why we haven't seen congressional action.
SPEAKER_03Um we're gonna pause here for just a moment for a word from our sponsors, and we will be right back with Senator Aaron May Quaid.
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SPEAKER_03Senator Quaid, we were talking about your work in the legislature in pushing for more privacy protection for people using social media and artificial intelligence in particular. So I wanted to, we were talking before the break about the child social media safety bill, uh, trying to put some safeguards in there. It seems that the evidence is accumulating from professionals that young children particularly are spending way too much time on their devices and social media. There have been some moves by foreign countries. Uh I was in Australia in December when they announced the first nationwide restriction ban on social media for children. I believe it was under 16, I think. And then I believe there's been discussion in France or perhaps some other countries too, if I have that right. Um, but your uh legislation that you were uh moving on actually gives parents the right to sign up for uh the children would have to have the parents permission to have accounts. Doesn't say they can't have them, but the parents would be the ones giving permission and presumably monitoring the amount of time the children are spending on the site.
SPEAKER_02Yes, they can set time limits, days of time, weeks of the day. Um, but there's nothing that requires the parent to monitor the content. I think it's really important that children have private lives too. I mean, they they do get to do that. Um, and then there's requirements to those children's accounts. But I do think that there's something really beautiful about requiring a parent to know and consent to their child having social media, because a lot of parents will say, I don't think my child has social media, but they could and I wouldn't know, right? And so setting up that barrier, I think, is really important because it allows the conversation between the parent and the child to happen.
SPEAKER_03Very good. Um, you have also become interested in the use of artificial intelligence with respect to how it can be used or may we even say abused in the realm of health insurance.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_03Tell us about your efforts to regulate how health insurers can use artificial intelligence.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So uh I passed into law a requirement that uh, well, so let me tell the problem. The first is the problem that insurance companies were basically using AI to mass sort and deny insurance claims. Um, there are a tremendous number of problems with that, but the primary one is that AI gets things wrong all the time. And we know that insurance denials can kill people, right? It can be deadly. And so leaving that up to AI alone is just, I think, irresponsible and not safe for consumers. And so the law that we put into place would require there to be human review of AI if they're reviewing insurance denials. That's not what my bill originally did. I didn't want AI involved at all in denials, but it got watered down a little bit by industry, and I'll be coming back to fix it this year. But I think it's an important first step. No mass batch denials, and we can see if that has an impact on denials and claims.
SPEAKER_03Do we know two questions for you, real quick, while they come to mind? Do we know of any health insurance companies in Minnesota that are already using AI for these purposes? And and um do you think that this legislation will be successful? Have you have you been able to make some headway? And are there parts of it that you haven't gotten through that you're gonna revisit in the next session?
SPEAKER_02Uh I would assume all of them are using AI at this point, maybe not to mass batch deni. Um, and the part that I want to come back to next session is that it's not that a human has to review AI created denials, it's that denials can't be created with AI. So AI can sort maybe alphabetically or by claim size or dollar amount, but that a human has to generate the reason for the denial. That's what I'd like to change. Right now it's just a human has to overview.
SPEAKER_03You know, one of the things I'm sure you've thought about and would be would be interesting to see would be data about how using AI affects the denial rate. Are we seeing the denial rate spiking when AI is making these decisions without human intervention?
SPEAKER_02Uh yes, they are. We've seen um, I think it was a ProPublica uh report that showed, I think it was at Cigna, that they were batch denying in 1.2 seconds, like 13,000 claims. So yes, denials are definitely increasing.
SPEAKER_03And we should be very clear when an insurance company denies coverage, people may not be able to get the treatment that has been recommended by a doctor, by a medical professional, and it can be the difference literally between life and death for people.
SPEAKER_02Yes, I have a lot of opinions about insurance companies uh and their ability to deny, but I think inserting AI into the process makes an already very big problem even worse.
SPEAKER_03We are going to be watching further developments on that. We're down to about eight minutes, and I have two other big issues regarding uh uh media and AI that I want to talk to you about. Uh there's been a lot in the news recently about these so-called flock surveillance cameras, private companies that are collecting photo and video databases of people's movements. And we are not, you know, many times we hear about law enforcement agencies trying to use this type of surveillance technology to solve crimes or to track criminals, but we've heard disturbing reports recently about people being used stalked with this technology, and also people who are not accused or are not suspect of being involved in criminal activity, yet having their movements in public uh surveyed, and also big questions about what's done with that database, who controls it, what happens to that information. What are your concerns about this?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'll add on too that we have seen a number of wrongful arrests and wrongful incarcerations because of AI. You know, this car was in a car accident, no, it wasn't, or this person committed a crime, they're held at gunpoint, this happened in Wisconsin on a road. Oh, flock got it wrong. Um, AI gets things wrong a lot. So uh I am deeply opposed to the existence of flock cameras. Um, I don't like automatic license plate readers for the same reason because it's not just reading a license plate, it's capturing our movements. Our gates, our faces, and creating a database that was just released on Wednesday by Wired is connecting to our social security numbers and our birth dates. It's horrible what they're doing. Some of that information is going back to law enforcement when they request it, but most of the information that's being collected by Flock is for their own personal private use.
SPEAKER_03When law enforcement requests it in Minnesota or anywhere else, do they have to obtain a judicial warrant to get that? Or is it just an informal request to Flock to provide us info from their database?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's the whole purpose of a private company doing it, is that they don't even need to do an informal request. It's just outreach. Hey, give us this information. There's no requirement for a judicial warrant, there's no requirement for an active case, it's just whenever and whatever. And there was a bill to fix that this past session. It was Representative Brad Tabke and Senator Claire Umover Baton. The bill died in the House on a party line and committee, which is actually very surprising to me because this has been a very bipartisan space. And so there was attempted action by DFLers in the Minnesota legislature, and it sadly died on a partisan vote.
SPEAKER_03I understand that they were able to use uh, for example, some of the highway surveillance cam uh cameras last year to track down the convicted assassin of former Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark. And that there are legitimate uses for these cameras, but isn't the problem that we seem not to be able at this point to separate legitimate uses of these types of cameras from illegitimate uses, and that hence that's the problem.
SPEAKER_02And I I want to add too that the part of the problem is the private company in between. This isn't a product that is owned and operated by a police department. It is a product that's owned and operated by a private company for insert whatever use you want. And then some of that information is given back to a local law enforcement department for the contract money. And so that is, I think, one of the biggest problems, and it's one we need to solve.
SPEAKER_03Very interesting. Data centers. Yes. You can't turn on the news or pick up a newspaper and not be reading about data centers. Um, this is an issue that again seems to cross party lines. There seems to be broad, uh, deep concern about the development of large data centers in particular, but really any data centers. And I heard a discussion on TV the other day, which I thought there was a phrase that was used by one of the commentators. I'm sorry I forgot who it was, but it caught my attention. This person said, quote, socializing the costs of developing AI, but privatizing the profits. And what the idea behind what they were expressing was that we are seeing AI data centers, the large ones, using enormous amounts of electricity, large amounts of water, issues about environmental protections, issues about noise and light and other things and livability in communities. These are some of the issues. This issue is coming up here in Minnesota in a number of cities, as I'm sure you're aware. The city of Egan is one of the cities that passed, we passed the first one-year moratorium on the state on new data centers. We have Mayor Mike McGuire on our program recently who said it was to look closely at the zoning issues, whether or not we could have data centers in Egan. But there are all these other concerns. What's your take on data centers?
SPEAKER_02So I'm deeply opposed to hyperscale data centers for a number of reasons, many of which you you listed off. I think I'm the first state senator in the entire state whose entire district has a de facto moratorium on data centers because East uh Eastview, uh Rosemount and Apple Valley, in addition to Egan, also have one-year moratoriums. And so, you know, part of this is brought on by the fact that I'm also the first state senator to represent constituents who live near a hyperscale data center. The metadata center is set to open pretty soon. That was passed under an NDA. No, at no point could citizens get involved in the process to say why and who and what you know what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_03I'm so glad you're non-disclosure agreement, we should say. I'm so glad you brought that up because I want to ask you Minnesota has a law, an open meeting law.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_03That when the public's business is being conducted by elected officials such as yourself, but also city council members, county board members, any public officials, any elected officials, those meetings are supposed to be out in the open for the public to see and hear the arguments of people for something and against. Aren't these non-disclosure agreements by definition in violation of Minnesota's open meeting law?
SPEAKER_02So it's a great question. I carried two bills, one to prohibit all NDAs uh at the city level, and then one bill to prohibit NDAs for data centers and require proactive disclosure. Um and I asked the Attorney General's office, can you tell me if if non-disclosure agreements are illegal or are they violating the law? And they got back to me with it's a gray area. And here's how. Yes. Because all of first of all, in Rosemount, all of the conversation did happen in public. It was just under a code name, Project Bigfoot. And so if you were watching your city council meeting or your planning commission meeting, they were in the open. Yes, probably. No, the one meeting about it was six.
SPEAKER_03That seems disingenuous.
SPEAKER_02I would agree. Now, we have a data practices act in the state of Minnesota, and all of the what data is private, what data is public, for how long, from whom, all of that is laid out in our data practices act. And so that is proactive. It says what is private, what isn't private, but it doesn't ban non-disclosure agreements. And so non-disclosure agreements are just like everything's private. And because there's no penalty for saying all things are private, you know what I'm saying? Like that's where the gray area exists, which is why I have the bill to say, no, you may not use NDAs at the city level. You're gonna have to do the people's business with the people and be honest about what it is.
SPEAKER_03Thank you.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03We are gonna be hearing much more, I'm sure, about this issue. I'm sure as you door knock in your race for re-election, uh, you're hearing about it from constituents. But I think there's very broad concern about these data centers and how they could be impacting our neighborhoods and what we're gonna be paying for electricity and water in the future.
SPEAKER_02I will say I also and there's a tax exemption that data centers get, so it's about $230 million per biennium with the small data centers we have now. The hyperscale data center like Meta and all the other ones, it could be close to a billion. But I have lawn signs that say people over data centers. That's how big of an issue it is.
SPEAKER_03Senator Aram Mae Quaid, thank you for being our guest today on Access to Democracy to talk about these issues. Come see us again soon.
SPEAKER_02Anytime. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_00Access to Democracy is produced by Alan and Sharon Miller, directed by Mary Dalton, live audio mixed by Sharon Miller, or technical and post-production services provided by Legan Television. This program was recorded at Egan High School. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not only those of the producers and or the persons appearing on the program. They do not reflect the views and opinions of each other or those of each other one of the