AI Regulation Is Heating Up And The U.S. Needs To Catch Up
The AI boom is upon us, and the world needs to get up to speed. In the wake of the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot towards the end of 2022 the wider public has begun to wake up to the profound changes artificial intelligence might bring to our daily lives. But as for legislators, things have fairly been slow — especially in the United States. While the European Union (EU) has just introduced an act to regulate AI, the U.S. has been comparatively slow off the mark. And that needs to change.
Big questions of ethics, law, and society
ChatGPT really changed the game, when it comes to concerns about AI technology. The subject of AI suddenly became a critical one, and its potential to change our world became impossible to ignore. With its ability to generate data, text, music, video, and art with a few clicks of a mouse, a whole host of ethical, legal, and social quandaries have arisen.
There are big questions surrounding AI that are difficult to answer. When a system generates content derived from existing work that’s owned by others, for instance, who owns that new content? How do we stop AI from discriminating against people, based on biases that already exist in the data it uses to learn?
Voting overwhelmingly in favor
The E.U. has sought to address issues of this nature with the implementation of its new law. The supranational body’s parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of the legislation on March 13, 2024, with 523 votes for and 46 against. Forty-nine members of parliament abstained from the vote.
The law won’t come totally into effect right away, but rather with provisions incrementally coming into play over the following three years. The legislation has been heralded as the first ever comprehensive set of rules for governing AI.
Rethinking the social contract
Supporters of Europe’s AI law are pleased by the focus the 27-nation body exhibited in pushing it through. As the Romanian member of the European Parliament, Dragoș Tudorache, remarked in comments published by Forbes, “AI will push us to rethink the social contract.”
He went on, “[It’s]... at the heart of our democracies, our education models, labor markets, and the way we conduct warfare. The AI Act is a starting point for a new model of governance built around technology. We must now focus on putting this law into practice.”
Falling short of the mark?
The United States, meanwhile, has arguably fallen behind. At the end of October 2023 President Joe Biden did issue an executive order related to AI governance, but critics say it fell well short of what the EU has managed to achieve with its AI law.
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Big talk accompanied the order — it represented, the White House claimed, “the most sweeping actions ever taken to protect Americans from the potential risks of AI.” But in practice many believe it didn’t go far enough.