What does a mayor actually do about artificial intelligence?

George A. Cardenas is Chairman and Commissioner of the Cook County Board of Review and a candidate for mayor of Chicago.

He came to Chicago from Durango as a boy, went to Lane Tech, joined the Navy to pay for school, and audited Fortune 500books before spending nearly twenty years as alderman of the 12th Ward.

He now runs the office that hears roughly a quarter of a million property tax appeals a year.

In this conversation he becomes the first candidate in the 2027 field to commit to a structure: a chief of AI and a digital transformation officer inside his first hundred days, working with the CIO, corporation counsel, the inspectorgeneral and procurement, and accountable to the mayor.

"Within my first hundred days, I would designate a chief of AI and a digital transformation officer, that would be working with the current CIO and corporation counsel and the inspector general and procurement and operating departments, and ultimately to be accountable to the mayor. To me. For thatimplementation."

Which AI risks end up in legislation, and where does that ranking come from?

Nick Diakopoulos has spent a decade on that question. He is a professor of communication studies and, by courtesy, computer science at Northwestern University, where he directs the Computational Journalism Lab.

He put the phrase "algorithmic accountability reporting" into circulation in a 2013 essay for The Atlantic and a 2014 Tow Center report, and his book Automating the News: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Media (Harvard University Press, 2019) won the Tankard Book Award.

In this conversation he walks through two studies. The first analyzed 42,853 news articles across 27 countries to measure which AI harms actually get covered: societal risk dominates at roughly half of all coverage, legal and rights harms take about a third, and existential risk finishes fifth at 7%.

The second, presented at AAAI/ACM's AI, Ethics, and Society conference in 2025, narrows to US outlets and finds that risk coverage sorts by political lean — right-leaning outlets emphasizing malicious use, left-leaning outlets emphasizing socioeconomic and environmental harm, and both using the word "discrimination" to describe different phenomena.

The conclusion is uncomfortable and hard to dismiss: AI risk assessment inherits the politics of the information reaching the people who write the rules.

When Illinois decided to regulate AI in hiring, it skipped the standard playbook. It passed no standalone AI statute and mandated no bias audit.

Instead, it amended the sixty-year-old Illinois Human Rights Act, making algorithmic discrimination a civil rights matter and enforced by the same agency that handles housing, credit, and employment complaints.

House Bill 3773 took effect January 1, 2026.

Jason Rosensweig is one of the few people in the country writing the rules that will govern it. As Senior Policy Advisor at the Illinois Department of Human Rights, he's drafting the implementing regulations — Subpart J — that will shape how thousands of Illinois employers, and the vendors selling into them, operate.

We get into:

• Why Illinois built the law on a civil rights chassis, and how that decision determines which doctrines apply and what evidence courts will demand
• How a single-issue bill about zip codes grew into a statewide notice regime
• Why the compliance mechanism is disclosure rather than an audit — and how the notice doubles as data infrastructure for future enforcement
• The "influence or facilitate" standard, and why its reach covers far more of the employment lifecycle than most compliance teams have scoped for
• Why liability sits with employers rather than the developers who build the tools, and how Illinois vendor contracts are about to change in 2026
• Jason's blunt response to the claim that AI moves too fast for government to regulate

Jason holds a PhD from the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought and also teaches in the Northwestern Prison Education Project.