New California Laws Going into Effect in 2026

The AI bits look interesting, but the laws appear vague and toothless. E.g, "identify every specific artificial intelligence program used" means all the reports will say “This report was written either fully or in part using artificial intelligence.” without any useful details.

> Artificial Intelligence The popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) has grown rapidly in the last several years and the widespread use of generative AI, or AI that can create original content, presents new legal considerations.

> With the passage of AB 316, a defendant may not say artificial intelligence that they developed, modified, or used that is alleged is to have caused harm to the plaintiff did so autonomously.

> Additionally, law enforcement agencies will need to identify when artificial intelligence was used in official reports and the type of program they used (SB 524).

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml... https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB316/id/3223647

> In this program, domestic violence consultants will offer guidance to county social workers on how to best support families potentially experiencing both domestic violence and child maltreatment

What about the obvious problem?

1) in just about every case domestic violence is the result of real-world pressure, almost always financial, usually on both the culprit and the victim.

2) neither "domestic violence consultants" nor "social workers" will EVER do anything about financial pressures on families, besides their bosses are the state, and would be the ones paying for any financial assistance. Nor are either of these classes of people even trained to do that.

3) Therefore it should not come as a surprise that child welfare "help" with domestic violence usually makes the situation worse, not better.

And, let's apply this to what's been happening.

4) the actions of Trump have made the financial situation of a lot of families worse, directly through the imposition of tariffs, the cancellation of healthcare subsidies, the mass-layoffs in the government, and indirectly by destroying jobs through political games and canceling programs. Since change happens at the margin, this is going to have caused a large increase in work for social services. Oh, and of course, because of the stigma of this now their customers (which are really mom and dad, of course) they're now seeing that while mom and dad literally can't agree on closing a door, they do agree on being drastically against child services, even to the point of violence. By which I mean, violence against social services has gone up enormously and is about to go up, a lot, again. Oh, and savings everywhere mean of course that the odds of police reacting to violence against social workers goes down.

Of course, social services COULD conclude from this that their expertise does not matter, literally makes a violent situation more violent and their involvement does not result in improved outcomes, or at least that any effect they have is totally overwhelmed by financials. They could conclude that their expertise is totally misplaced and useless, and shift their focus almost 100% to improving financial outcomes for families. Of course ... fat chance.

(this, by the way, is a huge point of conflict between police and social studies: for the police THE big no-no for police intervention is that if an officer is making things worse, he should either call reinforcements and arrest everyone or just go away, including for his own protection. And by that I mean, almost always go away. Social sciences, of course, likes to pretend that people fighting over income while income is dropping is just one "keep calm, don't you love your children?" away from being resolved. And of course, social services employees find it VERY unfair that given that the state is responsible for taking the money away, very directly this year, and social workers represent the state, that the obvious reaction of people is against social workers, including in some cases violently)

So ... 5) instead of at least resizing child services departments, social studies departments, advisors, policy makers are going to ... "social service" the social services departments and child services. They will hire extra people not to become extra social workers, but to point out that the fact that social workers keep getting into violent situations ... is their own fault, not the fault of the field ignoring underlying problems.

So ironically child services will collapse further because of this.