The Ins and Outs of AI Law

How Is Artificial Intelligence Currently Regulated?

As is often the case with new and quickly evolving technologies, regulations have yet to catch up to the current capabilities and risks of AI. In May 2024, the European Parliament adopted AI legislation that will ban certain applications of the technology and enforce tighter regulations around high-risk activities. However, the full rollout of the new law will take two years.

At this point, most intersections between AI and law fall into grayer areas than the EU’s legislation. Several states have passed laws requiring a deeper examination of the technology and its risks, while North Dakota has explicitly declared that AI is not included in the definition of a person. Many others have passed specific AI laws regarding self-driving vehicles.

Outside of the above, AI regulations are currently a hodgepodge of industry-specific policies, or they fall under broader laws governing data privacy and copyrights. Considering that AI has numerous applications across many different fields and industries, a traditional regulatory approach would likely be ineffective and difficult to enact.

Risks Associated With AI

While AI provides many benefits and cutting-edge solutions, experts agree that it also poses quite a few risks. These concerns include but are not limited to:

• Data privacy
• Discrimination stemming from biased facial and speech recognition algorithms
• Flaws in AI-based decision making
• Human injury resulting from autonomous vehicles
• Ethical nature of AI
• Intentional malicious use of AI (e.g., creating deep fakes or training bots to spread misinformation)
• Loss of jobs

Concerns around these and other issues are gaining momentum as the use of AI proliferates. Current and former employees of OpenAI and Google DeepMind have called for greater corporate transparency and accountability, along with whistleblower protections for employees.

There are plenty of concerns surrounding the use of AI within the legal field, too. For instance, legal AI tools bring enormous productivity benefits, but they also show a propensity to make up information.

Clearly, there are still many risks to address with AI technology. The United Nations put it bluntly in its “Interim Report on Governing AI for Humanity:”

“AI can reinforce biases or expand surveillance; automated decision-making can blur accountability of public officials even as AI-enhanced disinformation threatens the process of electing them. The speed, autonomy, and opacity of AI systems challenge traditional models of regulation, even as ever more powerful systems are developed, deployed, and used.”

Benefits of AI Laws

As always, there must be a balance between robust regulation and freedom for innovation. At their best, artificial intelligence regulations should provide important guardrails to protect society and its members from privacy violations and prevent corporate abuses.

In some areas, these benefits are fairly obvious. Self-driving cars pose a direct threat to humans, and there is abundant precedent for regulation in the automotive industry.

But regulations must stretch much further to ensure AI technology is shared equitably and used fairly, keeping human rights front and center. By implementing smart AI laws, governments can protect their citizens from things like:

How Will the Law Apply to Artificial Intelligence in the Future?

AI and the law are destined to be in tension going forward. More states will experiment with regulations, and the calls for legislation will likely only grow louder as companies test the limits of this technology.

Expanding regulations need not threaten the potential of AI, however.

“Genuinely sensible regulatory parameters, which balance the need for oversight and safe product development with the ability to innovate, are desperately needed,” the World Economic Forum declared in 2023. “With the right privacy and safety protections in place, the limits to what AI can achieve to benefit society could be boundless.”