Good luck keeping up with the whirlwind of new AI regulation
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The U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium, the European AI Office, the Council of Europe's Committee on AI, the UN AI Advisory Body: There are so many AI regulatory bodies popping up.
It feels like every day, there's another AI task force, regulatory body, or other group being created or proposed to tackle AI regulation. There's also a flurry of guidelines being issued and legislation being proposed at every level of government around the globe, and the execution of President Joe Biden's wide-ranging AI executive order alone is almost too much to follow. “There are a lot of cooks in the AI policy kitchen,” as Axios Pro said in its recent report examining the state of AI policy and regulations.
Between the pace of AI and the increasingly complex regulatory picture, it's becoming increasingly hard to follow what’s happening, who’s in charge of what, and what progress is actually being made. Even the Center for AI and Digital Policy, which I’d consider to be the premier resource for all things AI policy and which watches all this like a hawk, mentioned in its newsletter this week how difficult it is to track all the AI bills cropping up. But as I pointed out in my recent issue of Eye on AI discussing the upcoming challenges around actually enforcing the recently enacted EU AI Act, making sure these efforts are actually executed is the most important part.
“Following regulatory developments around AI is challenging because of their quantity, the rapid pace of their introduction, and the skills needed to decipher their content and implications,” said Ravit Dotan, an AI researcher and ethicist who created and has been continuously updating a collection of AI policy resources—such as her free AI legislation trackers—to help people cut through the noise.
Trackers like Dotan’s help bring together all the information in one place, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center also keeps a handy list of all the state AI laws being proposed and enacted, for example. To see where AI policy is headed, one can also keep an eye on the lobbying efforts coming out of the tech industry. Much of this action is happening over private dinners and roundtables with heads of state around the world, as Politico detailed yesterday in a report going inside the “shadowy global battle” to tame AI technology. But as is shown by the article, which reveals AI policy-related conversations between three dozen politicians, policymakers, and tech executives, these efforts have now hit the mainstream and will continue to be subject to increased public scrutiny. As calls for regulations surge, the money spent on AI lobbying spiked 185% last year, CNBC reported.
Aside from these debates and the new AI-specific efforts unfolding, another challenging aspect is following the activities of enforcement agencies that apply non-AI-specific laws to AI. Dotan pointed to the FTC's case against RiteAid for deploying AI facial recognition technologies without safeguards as well as the agency’s investigation into OpenAI.
“These activities are very consequential to AI regulation but they get much less attention, so it can be challenging to even hear about them,” Dotan said, adding that while some new laws can be helpful, there isn’t actually a need to reinvent the legal system.
“In fact, pointing the finger at new laws can be an effective way to distract the public's attention from the fact that companies need to be held accountable to the laws that are already in place. More attention to enforcing existing, non-AI-specific laws on AI is a great, and probably faster, way to protect the public,” she said.
And with that, here’s more AI news.
Sage Lazzaro
sage.lazzaro@consultant.fortune.com
sagelazzaro.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
