Kristian Stout on the Biden Administration’s Approach to AI

Law.com – ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout was quoted by Law.com in a story about the Biden administration’s approach to regulating artificial intelligence. You can read full piece here.

Kristian Stout, director of innovation policy at the nonprofit International Center for Law & Economics, agreed.

“AI intersects with a lot of different regulatory and policy agendas, and it also intersects with a lot of different points of anxiety in the general public that have been percolating over the last 10 or 15 years as tech companies have become more prominent in society,” Stout said.

Stout said that it appears to him that the Biden administration is trying to “gently coerce” Big Tech companies to commit that they will ensure AI products are safe before introducing them to the public, and that they will build systems that put security first and secure the public’s trust.

… While AI already plays a behind-the-scenes role for many Americans through smart devices such as Siri and Alexa or through predicative-text completion on emails, the conversation around AI really seemed to take off with the recent launch of ChatGPT, Stout said.

…“There are things we need to be concerned with. First off, we need to get away from the ‘It’s about to end the world.’ That is totally not a useful thing to think about,” Stout said.

“But we do want to think about ‘Could [ChatGPT] be used to promote more fraud, accelerate spam calls or accelerate fraud on consumers. There’s that potential there. At the same time, you want to start thinking about how can police departments start using facial recognition and advanced analytics to target people that we don’t want them targeting? That’s a valid concern,” Stout said.