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Filmmaker, director, producer and actress Sydney Scotia’s new documentary This Hits Home was shot using Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K G2 digital film camera. The feature-length documentary reveals the invisible and silent epidemic of permanent traumatic brain injury in women devastated by domestic violence. Built around intimate and compelling stories of courageous women, insights from lawmakers and domestic violence authorities, and the shocking revelations from world renowned experts at the Mayo Clinic, Harvard University, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania, the film paints a chilling portrait of brain injury that forever changes the lives of women and their children.

The film was shot on a small budget with a crew of Scotia and cinematographers Erik Rojas and A.J. Raitano. The Pocket Cinema Camera 6K G2 was used as the primary camera for the film, shooting interviews, B roll, exteriors and inside car scenes. Due to the seriousness of the topic, Scotia needed to ensure that anyone interviewed was completely at ease and relaxed. A large camera that required extensive lighting and rigging was not possible.

DaVinci Resolve Studio editing, grading, visual effects (VFX) and audio post software was used for color correction of the documentary, as well as for preparing the film for delivery to festivals and streaming services.

As state lawmakers rush to get a handle on fast-evolving artificial intelligence technology, they're often focusing first on their own state governments before imposing restrictions on the private sector.

Legislators are seeking ways to protect constituents from discrimination and other harms while not hindering cutting-edge advancements in medicine, science, business, education and more.

"We're starting with the government. We're trying to set a good example," Connecticut state Sen. James Maroney said during a floor debate in May.

Connecticut plans to inventory all of its government systems using artificial intelligence by the end of 2023, posting the information online. And starting next year, state officials must regularly review these systems to ensure they won't lead to unlawful discrimination.

Maroney, a Democrat who has become a go-to AI authority in the General Assembly, said Connecticut lawmakers will likely focus on private industry next year. He plans to work this fall on model AI legislation with lawmakers in Colorado, New York, Virginia, Minnesota and elsewhere that includes "broad guardrails" and focuses on matters like product liability and requiring impact assessments of AI systems.

"It's rapidly changing and there's a rapid adoption of people using it. So we need to get ahead of this," he said in a later interview. "We're actually already behind it, but we can't really wait too much longer to put in some form of accountability."

Overall, at least 25 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia introduced artificial intelligence bills this year. As of late July, 14 states and Puerto Rico had adopted resolutions or enacted legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The list doesn't include bills focused on specific AI technologies, such as facial recognition or autonomous cars, something NCSL is tracking separately.

Legislatures in Texas, North Dakota, West Virginia and Puerto Rico have created advisory bodies to study and monitor AI systems their respective state agencies are using, while Louisiana formed a new technology and cyber security committee to study AI's impact on state operations, procurement and policy. Other states took a similar approach last year.

Lawmakers want to know "Who's using it? How are you using it? Just gathering that data to figure out what's out there, who's doing what," said Heather Morton, a legislative analysist at NCSL who tracks artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, privacy and internet issues in state legislatures. "That is something that the states are trying to figure out within their own state borders."

Connecticut's new law, which requires AI systems used by state agencies to be regularly scrutinized for possible unlawful discrimination, comes after an investigation by the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School determined AI is already being used to assign students to magnet schools, set bail and distribute welfare benefits, among other tasks. However, details of the algorithms are mostly unknown to the public.

AI technology, the group said, "has spread throughout Connecticut's government rapidly and largely unchecked, a development that's not unique to this state."

Richard Eppink, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho, testified before Congress in May about discovering, through a lawsuit, the "secret computerized algorithms" Idaho was using to assess people with developmental disabilities for federally funded health care services. The automated system, he said in written testimony, included corrupt data that relied on inputs the state hadn't validated.

AI can be shorthand for many different technologies, ranging from algorithms recommending what to watch next on Netflix to generative AI systems such as ChatGPT that can aid in writing or create new images or other media. The surge of commercial investment in generative AI tools has generated public fascination and concerns about their ability to trick people and spread disinformation, among other dangers.

Some states haven't attempted to tackle the issue yet. In Hawaii, state Sen. Chris Lee, a Democrat, said lawmakers didn't pass any legislation this year governing AI "simply because I think at the time, we didn't know what to do."

Instead, the Hawaii House and Senate passed a resolution Lee proposed that urges Congress to adopt safety guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence and limit its application in the use of force by police and the military.

Lee, vice-chair of the Senate Labor and Technology Committee, said he hopes to introduce a bill in next year's session that is similar to Connecticut's new law. Lee also wants to create a permanent working group or department to address AI matters with the right expertise, something he admits is difficult to find.

"There aren't a lot of people right now working within state governments or traditional institutions that have this kind of experience," he said.

The European Union is leading the world in building guardrails around AI. There has been discussion of bipartisan AI legislation in Congress, which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in June would maximize the technology's benefits and mitigate significant risks.

Yet the New York senator did not commit to specific details. In July, President Joe Biden announced his administration had secured voluntary commitments from seven U.S. companies meant to ensure their AI products are safe before releasing them.

Maroney said ideally the federal government would lead the way in AI regulation. But he said the federal government can't act at the same speed as a state legislature.

"And as we've seen with the data privacy, it's really had to bubble up from the states," Maroney said.

Some state-level bills proposed this year have been narrowly tailored to address specific AI-related concerns. Proposals in Massachusetts would place limitations on mental health providers using AI and prevent "dystopian work environments" where workers don't have control over their personal data. A proposal in New York would place restrictions on employers using AI as an "automated employment decision tool" to filter job candidates.

North Dakota passed a bill defining what a person is, making it clear the term does not include artificial intelligence. Republican Gov. Doug Burgum, a long-shot presidential contender, has said such guardrails are needed for AI but the technology should still be embraced to make state government less redundant and more responsive to citizens.

In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed legislation that would prohibit voting machines from having any artificial intelligence software. In her veto letter, Hobbs said the bill "attempts to solve challenges that do not currently face our state."

In Washington, Democratic Sen. Lisa Wellman, a former systems analyst and programmer, said state lawmakers need to prepare for a world in which machine systems become ever more prevalent in our daily lives.

She plans to roll out legislation next year that would require students to take computer science to graduate high school.

"AI and computer science are now, in my mind, a foundational part of education," Wellman said. "And we need to understand really how to incorporate it."

Associated Press Writers Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu, Ed Komenda in Seattle and Matt O'Brien in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this report.

Facebook parent company Meta Platforms has built an artificial intelligence system that rivals the likes of ChatGPT and Google's Bard but it's taking a different approach: releasing it for free.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company is partnering with Microsoft to introduce the next generation of its AI large language model and making the technology, known as Llama 2, free for research and commercial use.

Much like tech peers Google and Microsoft, the social media company has long had a big research team of computer scientists devoted to advancing AI technology. But it's been overshadowed as the release of ChatGPT sparked a rush to profit off of “generative AI” tools that can create new prose, images and other media.

Meta has also tried to distinguish itself by being more open than some of its Big Tech rivals about offering a peek at the data and code it uses to build AI systems. It has argued that such openness makes it easier for outside researchers to help identify and mitigate the bias and toxicity that AI systems pick up by ingesting how real people write and communicate.

“Open source drives innovation because it enables many more developers to build with new technology,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post Tuesday. “It also improves safety and security because when software is open, more people can scrutinize it to identify and fix potential issues. I believe it would unlock more progress if the ecosystem were more open, which is why we’re open sourcing Llama 2.”

Zuckerberg pointed to Meta's history of open-sourcing its AI work, such as with its development of the widely used machine-learning framework PyTorch.

But the research paper introducing the new model reflects less openness than Meta has shown previously in its work to build models that require ingesting large troves of digitized writings such as books, news articles and social media feeds.

It says the latest model was trained on “a new mix of data from publicly available sources, which does not include data from Meta’s products or services,” but does not specify what data was used. It does say that Meta removed data from websites known to contain a “high volume of personal information about private individuals.”

Meta used the acronym LLaMA, for Large Language Model Meta AI, to describe the first version of its model, announced in February. It’s now dropped the capital letters for its second version, Llama 2.

Zuckerberg said people can download its new AI models directly or through a partnership that makes them available on Microsoft's cloud platform Azure “along with Microsoft’s safety and content tools.”

The financial terms of that partnership were not disclosed.

While Microsoft is described by Meta as a “preferred” partner, Meta said the models will also be available through Amazon Web Services, which is Microsoft's main cloud rival, as well as AI startup Hugging Face and others.

Microsoft is also a major funder and partner of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Neither ChatGPT nor similar offerings from Microsoft or Google are open source.

Microsoft and Meta also revealed the new AI partnership at Microsoft’s annual event for business customers on Tuesday. Microsoft said in a separate statement that the two companies “share a commitment to democratizing AI and its benefits and we are excited that Meta is taking an open approach.” Meta already is a customer of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.

Microsoft also used the virtual event, called Ignite, to reveal that it will be charging businesses a monthly fee of $30 for each user of its flagship generative AI tool, Microsoft 365 Copilot, on top of what those organizations are already paying for Microsoft services.

More than 150 executives are urging the European Union to rethink the world's most comprehensive rules for artificial intelligence, saying Friday that upcoming regulations will make it harder for companies in Europe to compete with rivals overseas, especially when it comes to the technology behind systems like ChatGPT.

Officials at companies from French planemaker Airbus and carmaker Renault to Dutch beer giant Heineken signed an open letter to EU leaders saying the 27-nation bloc's groundbreaking legislation may put shackles on the development of generative AI. That technology gives popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT the power to generate text, images, video and audio that resemble human work.

"Such regulation could lead to highly innovative companies moving their activities abroad " and investors withdrawing their money from AI development in Europe, the letter said. "The result would be a critical productivity gap between the two sides of the Atlantic."

The executives say laws requiring "rigid compliance" would be ineffective when so little is still known about the risks and uses of generative AI. They urged the EU to revise the AI Act to focus broadly on the risks.

With growing concerns about the impact of AI on all parts of life, the letter does acknowledge "a clear need to properly train these models and ensure their safe use."

The corporate leaders called for a regulatory body of experts that can regularly adapt rules to new developments and respond to risks that emerge. They also pointed to the need for transatlantic standards.

It's the latest letter to weigh in on the future of AI, which has dazzled users but raised concerns about data privacy, copyright infringement and disinformation. That has sent governments worldwide racing to rein in the technology.

There are also fears about more existential threats to humankind, which scientists and tech industry leaders, including high-level executives at Microsoft and Google, warned about last month.

Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist known as the godfather of AI, were among the hundreds of leading figures who signed that statement.

Missing was Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist of Meta and another AI pioneer, who signed the letter Friday from European executives.

The EU is still putting the finishing touches on its AI Act, and the rules are not expected to take effect for two years.

"I am convinced they have not read the text but have rather reacted on the stimulus of a few," Dragos Tudorache, a Romanian member of the European Parliament who is co-leading the measure, said of the executives who signed the letter.

He noted that the letter's "only concrete suggestions" are already part of the legislation, including "an industry-led process for defining standards, governance with industry at the table and a light regulatory regime that asks for transparency."