EVC's Ambreen Qureshi supports Intro 0504 and warns about erosion of truth

Thank you, Speaker Menon, Chair De La Rosa, and City Council for holding this hearing.

I'm testifying in support of Intro 0504, prohibiting the unauthorized depiction of public

My name is Ambreen Qureshi, and I'm the Executive Director of Educational Video Center, or EVC.

Up front, I would like to thank our Deputy Speaker, Dr.

Williams, and EVC's Council Champions, not only for advancing this critical bill, but for also supporting our important work with young New Yorkers.

Established 42 years ago, EVC is a media arts education nonprofit that teaches documentary filmmaking as a means to develop the artistic, critical literacy, civic engagement, and career skills of young people while nurturing their idealism and commitment to social change.

With the emergence of artificial intelligence across all sectors of society, EVC's young people are expressing increasing levels of anxiety about AI's impact on their mental health, their community well-being, their future as job seekers and learners in public and advanced education.

And most concerning of all, their ability to discern what is real and what is not.

AI's greatest victim, it seems, is truth itself.

Deep fake videos, gaslighting bots, hallucinating LLMs, the list goes on of the reasons why our young people are losing trust in the media and faith in their ability to discern what is real.

Our youth have expressed these concerns in numerous of their documentaries, including Beyond the Code and False Reality, in which students share their worries about AI's erosion of their education and cognitive capacities.

As a result of our students'concerns, and thanks to the City Council's After School Intelligence,

Artificial Intelligence Community Education Initiative, EDC, has become to offer work

in AI literacy.

Our workshops don't simply teach young people how to use these deeply flawed tools, but we give them the critical skills to begin to understand what works and what doesn't about AI.

The erosion of truth our students speak of represents an existential threat.

As it promises to undo so much of the systems and values that ground our young people's safety, security, and ability to thrive in our city.

Perhaps most troubling is how AI is eroding young people's capacity to know what is true in civic spaces, politics, and the electoral processes.

Throughout history, we've been able to rely on community members and the media to fact-check them and safeguard our political processes.

But with AI, bad actors can now generate images and messaging so real and with such speed that it's nearly impossible to keep up.

Please conclude if you can.

Thank you.

With the rise of extremely convincing AI-generated content and data-driven voter manipulation, EVC's young people are at risk of not only being misled in civic spaces, but if they do not know what to believe, of disengaging in the political process completely.

On behalf of the young people of EVC, I urge the City Council to pass Intro 0504, and if you're interested to watch our students'documentaries, on the back of the testimony is QR codes.

Thank you so much.

You may continue.