When Catherine Hanaway stepped forward after being announced as Missouri's next attorney general, she mentioned that her office would see how artificial intelligence programs could make the office run more efficiently.
Hanaway pointed out that attorneys can now use AI programs to quickly organize information in a manner that could have taken hours, or even days, of work.
There's no question that artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Grok have enormous potential to change the way people consume and organize information, as well as create informative and entertaining content. But many officials are calling for regulation.
During an episode of the Politically Speaking Hour on St. Louis on the Air, Oliver Roberts of the WashU Law AI Collaborative discussed why lawmakers want to place statutory guardrails around artificial intelligence. That includes U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, who introduced legislation allowing people to sue technology companies or individuals who feed their data into AI programs without consent.
Roberts said lawmakers wanting to protect certain information, like email addresses or login information, from being fed into AI systems makes sense and likely provides assurances to people using certain programs.
But he added that there is ambiguity around whether placing copyrighted work into AI systems without explicit permission of the creator are protected by what's known as Fair Use. That's the legal standard that allows people to use copyrighted material legally.
"This is an ongoing debate, and it's currently making its way through the courts. We now have over 48 copyright lawsuits, and they all have different iterations," Roberts said. "All these cases do have their own nuances, and what really complicates it is the affirmative defense that's being used by these AI companies is Fair Use. And the application of those Fair Use factors, which creates an exception to copyright law, those in themselves are often more amorphous, and they're not always applied consistently, and they could be fact specific.
"So this is kind of a gray area of the law that the courts are currently making their way through the courts," he added.
The environmental cost
During the Politically Speaking Hour on St. Louis on the Air conversation, St. Louis Public Radio's Kate Grumke detailed the immense backlash over a now-scuttled data center in St. Charles County.
In particular, she talked about the widespread fears from environmentalists about how the infrastructure needed to run artificial intelligence programs could consume massive amounts of power and water.
"To put this in perspective, last year, Ameren's largest customer had a peak electricity load of 32 megawatts in Kansas City. There's a Google data center that's being built that is going to be around 400 megawatts," Grumke said. "So these are just humongous increases in the amount of electricity that might be needed. And then on top of that, these systems get pretty hot, and so they also use water to cool them."
Missouri lawmakers, such as state Rep. Collin Wellenkamp, R-St. Charles County, expect robust debate in the General Assembly about whether to place statutory regulations on artificial intelligence.
That comes after a provision that would have severely restricted states from passing laws regulating AI failed to make it into President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill, which Roberts said was prompted by the release of the Chinese-made DeepSeek AI program.
"So the AI debate then became a matter of national security, became a geopolitical issue, and that's when these AI companies started pushing for federal preemption," Roberts said. "Because in all these different states right now, there's over 1,000 pending AI regulations, and these companies are going to navigate potentially 50 different frameworks of regulation. And these AI companies say that's going to kill our ability to expand and grow and compete with China."
"St. Louis on the Air" brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. Darrious Varner is our production assistant. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr.
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