Topline
The White House on Monday unveiled a broad executive order aimed at curbing the risks and “seizing the promise” of artificial intelligence, as President Joe Biden takes aim at complicated issues surrounding the fast-moving technology that lawmakers have struggled to meaningfully address.
President Joe Biden will sign an executive order Monday aimed at regulating artificial intelligence. … [+]
Key Facts
The order outlines “the most sweeping actions ever taken to protect Americans from the potential risks of AI” and will marshal government agencies and industry to address issues like privacy, trustworthiness and safety, the White House said in a statement.
Companies developing powerful AI systems that could pose a threat to national security, the economy or public health will be required to share the results of safety testing and other critical information with the U.S. government under the Cold War era Defense Production Act, the White House said.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology will also be directed to create a new set of “rigorous standards” to test AI systems before they’re released and agencies that fund life science projects will use these standards as a condition for grants to “protect against the risks of using AI to engineer dangerous biological materials.”
The order also aims at boosting consumer protections and tackling areas where AI might fuel discrimination, including providing guidance to landlords and benefits programs on how to prevent algorithmic discrimination, developing guidelines agencies can use to assess privacy issues in AI and crafting best practices for how AI can be used within the justice system.
The administration said it is also tackling deepfakes and other ways AI fuels disinformation and the White House said the Department of Commerce will develop guidance to clearly authenticate and watermark AI-generated content that will be used on official government communications “to make it easy for Americans to know” what they see from the government is real.
Biden is expected to sign the order at an event on Monday.
Tangent
The White House said the order marks the strongest attempt for a government to tackle AI. White House deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed, speaking to reporters on the new order, said the Biden Administration “is rolling out the strongest set of actions any government in the world has ever taken on AI safety, security and trust,” according to Axios. Reed said the executive order is “the next step in an aggressive strategy to do everything on all fronts to harness the benefits of AI and mitigate the risks.” Such statements may irk European lawmakers, who are on the cusp of approving an ambitious legal framework that would mark the world’s first set of harmonized laws tackling AI.
Key Background
The executive order builds on voluntary commitments the White House secured from industry leaders like ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet in July. The firms pledged to abide by a set of safeguards to mitigate the risks of AI but there was no mechanism through which to enforce participation nor meaningful punishment should they deviate. Such self-regulation has become a theme in technology in recent years as the rapid pace of development has outstripped lawmakers’ ability to keep up. The risks of AI have been a topic of discussion among regulators, civic leaders, technologists and lawmakers for years but has acquired a new sense of urgency with the release of generative AI systems like ChatGPT, which has been rapidly taken up by the public and can generate content like text, music, art, data and video from scratch. It raises a host of legal, social and ethical issues that cannot be easily resolved, such as who owns the products produced from a system trained on the work of many others and how to prevent AI systems from replicating and reinforcing the biases and discrimination from the data they are trained on. As companies jealously guard their products and the data used to design them, many claims of transparency have been treated with skepticism.
What To Watch For
Leaders from government and top tech firms are due to meet in the U.K. for a high level AI safety summit later this week. The U.S. is being represented by Vice President Kamala Harris, who is due to deliver a speech on the administration’s approach to AI.
Further Reading
Tech Giants Make ‘Voluntary’ Pledge To Develop Responsible AI—Including OpenAI And Google—White House Says (Forbes)
The world wants to regulate AI, but does not quite know how (Economist)
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2023/10/30/white-house-unveils-sweeping-ai-strategy-as-biden-pushes-for-transparency-and-safety/