Artificial intelligence. Whether you love it, hate it, or are indifferent, it's here, and there are important questions about how it will be used, and what sort of opportunities it presents for our region, which policymakers need to discuss.

Rep. Josh Christy is a first-term Republican lawmaker from Fargo who is heading into his second legislative session. He's also what you could call an AI professional. He's an entrepreneur, a software development executive, and a consultant who works with AI and AI policies on a regular basis.

"Two years ago, generative AI was not something anyone was talking about," he said, referring to his first session in Bismarck. But now it's here. Teachers are using it. Students are using it. The business community is using it. On this episode of Plain Talk, Christy argued that it's time for North Dakota's laws to catch up.

"With any type of technology, there's the good, the bad, the ugly," Christy said, and he's got legislative proposals for each of those. One bill he has developed in conjunction with Attorney General Drew Wrigley's office would address abusive uses of AI. Say, to develop images or videos of public figures for nefarious purposes or of children for sexual gratification.

"People are using this to generate images of children in compromising positions," Christy said, and current law doesn't necessarily address that.

But other initiatives Christy proposes would seek to welcome the AI industry into North Dakota as a partner. Christy proposes leveraging North Dakota's oil, gas, and coal resources to help power data centers. He wants to develop "computing credits" that could help facilitate the data industry's move into the state. He'll be pushing this bills during the upcoming legislative session, which begins in January.

Also on this episode, Chad Oban and I discuss the on-going controversies around Burleigh County auditor Mark Spolonskowski, the efforts to recall Dickinson city commissioner Jason Fridrich, the arrest of Luigi Mangione, who is accused of gunning down an insurance industry executive in Manhattan, and what all those stories mean for our society's notions about right and wrong.

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