Kristian Stout on AI Regulatory Proposals
ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout was quoted by Townhall in a story about Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s proposal to regulate artificial intelligence. You can read the full piece here.
“Initially created as a standards-setting body…the institute could be poised to become a de-facto regulatory authority,” argues Kristian Stout, the director of innovation policy at the International Center of Law and Economics. Experience has shown the propensity of jawboning and soft law to harden, bending industry to regulators’ will without the trouble of navigating traditional legislative or rulemaking channels. “This could create an avenue for AI safety alarmists to shape restrictive policies through ‘voluntary’ standards and guidelines that effectively become mandatory through market pressure, government contracting, and judicial deference,” Stout continues. The power of “suggestion,” when the state does the suggesting, is the looming threat of coercion.
Stout also worries that federally endorsed datasets might exert a gravitational force on developers, prompting industry to abandon other options. “Instead of fostering a diverse ecosystem of AI research and development, it could result in homogenization, where every AI model is trained on the same narrow datasets, limiting breakthroughs that might arise from alternative approaches,” he argues. It is impossible to avoid the fact that a regulator’s endorsement of one practice ineluctably discriminates against competing practices.