A familiar challenge is playing out in Alabama's legislature — one that has echoed through the history of technology regulation for decades: the law is struggling to keep pace with the technology it seeks to govern. Experts appearing before state lawmakers have urged legislators to establish clear, concrete definitions for both artificial intelligence and age-related thresholds before crafting future legislation touching these areas.
The call for definitional precision is hardly new in AI policy circles. When the internet first demanded legal frameworks in the 1990s, regulators similarly grappled with pinning down slippery concepts before they could meaningfully regulate them. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, for instance, spent considerable effort defining what constituted a child-directed platform before establishing any protections. That definitional groundwork shaped enforcement for decades.
Now, nearly thirty years later, state legislatures across the country are navigating an analogous moment with AI — a technology whose boundaries are far more contested than a webpage ever was. What qualifies as artificial intelligence under the law? Does a simple algorithmic filter meet the threshold? What about a large language model? The answers carry enormous legal consequences.
Alabama's situation reflects a broader national pattern. Without shared definitional frameworks, legislation risks either sweeping too broadly — capturing benign software in its regulatory net — or too narrowly, leaving genuinely powerful AI systems unaddressed. Legal ambiguity also invites inconsistent enforcement and courtroom challenges that can delay protections for years.
Experts advising Alabama lawmakers appear to understand this history well. Their guidance signals that the foundational work of definition must precede the more visible work of prohibition or permission. It is an unglamorous but essential step — one that legislators in the early days of broadcast regulation, telecommunications law, and data privacy all had to reckon with before any meaningful governance could take hold.
How Alabama ultimately defines artificial intelligence in statute may matter well beyond its borders, as states increasingly look to one another's legislative language as models. Getting the vocabulary right, as this moment of expert counsel suggests, is not a bureaucratic detail — it is the architecture upon which enforceable law is built.