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House of Commons Committee report: The governance of artificial intelligence - Dr Hayleigh Bosher

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This report published by The Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee, with a contribiution of Dr Hayleigh Bosher (Brunel University London), explores AI governance, analysing existing frameworks, regulations, and ethical guidelines for this powerful technology.

As we read in the report: "The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has ushered in a new era of transformative technologies with far-reaching implications for society. As AI permeates various aspects of our lives, concerns regarding its governance and ethical considerations have become increasingly pertinent."

The committee has identified twelve challenges of AI governance for policymakers:

1) The Bias challenge. AI can introduce or perpetuate socially unacceptable biases.
2)The Privacy challenge. AI can allow individuals to be identified and personal information about them to be used in ways beyond what the public wants.
3) The Misrepresentation challenge. AI can allow the generation of material that deliberately misrepresents someone’s behaviour, opinions or character.
4) The Access to Data challenge. The most powerful AI needs very large datasets, which are held by few organisations.
5) The Access to Compute challenge. The development of powerful AI requires significant compute power, access to which is limited to a few organisations.
6) The Black Box challenge. Some AI models and tools cannot explain why they produce a particular result, which is a challenge to transparency requirements.
7) The Open-Source challenge. Requiring code to be openly available may promote transparency and innovation; allowing it to be proprietary may concentrate market power but allow more dependable regulation of harms.
8) The Intellectual Property and Copyright Challenge. Some AI models and tools make use of other people’s content: policy must establish the rights of the originators of this content, and these rights must be enforced.
9) The Liability challenge. If AI models and tools are used by third parties to do harm, policy must establish whether developers or providers of the technology bear any liability for harms done.
10) The Employment challenge. AI will disrupt the jobs that people do and that are available to be done. Policy makers must anticipate and manage the disruption.
11) The International Coordination challenge. AI is a global technology, and the development of governance frameworks to regulate its uses must be an international undertaking.
12) The Existential challenge. Some people think that AI is a major threat to human life: if that is a possibility, governance needs to provide protections for national security.

Dr Bosher discussed AI and tech firms' potential gains from enforcing copyright and intellectual property rights.

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Reported by:

Eliza Kania
eliza.kania@brunel.ac.uk