Establishing requirements and guidelines for chatbots, making appropriations, and providing civil penalties

This bill establishes requirements and guidelines for chatbots. _____ application, and that accepts open-ended, natural-language, or multimodal user input and produces adaptive or context-responsive output. The bill also details an exception when a service or application is not a “chatbot”. The bill prohibits a person from designing, developing, or making a chatbot available with the knowledge, or with reckless disregard for the possibility, that the chatbot encourages, promotes, or coerces a user to commit suicide, perform acts of self-injury, or perform acts of physical or sexual violence on humans or animals. The bill requires each chatbot to clearly and conspicuously disclose that the chatbot is a chatbot and not a human being at the beginning of each conversation and at 30-minute intervals; be programmed to prevent the chatbot from claiming to be a human or respond deceptively when asked by a user if the chatbot is a human; clearly and conspicuously disclose that the chatbot does not provide medical, legal, financial, or psychological services and that the user should consult a licensed professional for such services at the beginning of each conversation and at regular intervals; and be programmed to prevent the chatbot from representing that the chatbot is a licensed professional, including but not limited to a therapist, physician, lawyer, financial advisor, or other professional. The bill creates a penalty of not more than $100,000 for each violation of the bill. Penalties collected under the bill are credited to the general fund of the state and appropriated to the attorney general to perform duties under the bill. The bill allows the attorney general to bring a civil action to enjoin a violation of or enforce compliance with the bill and seek civil penalties, restitution, or other appropriate relief. The bill requires the attorney general to adopt rules to implement the bill.