The wise thing to do is work in tandem with AI regulation by keeping the human element relevant

Does AI need to be reined in? Will putting regulations on AI curb the progress and the innovative future it promises? But, at the same time, isn’t AI going too fast? Do we, the users, even understand what we’re using?

As consumers we barely understand Gen AI. It does things for us, we love it. It hallucinates, it discriminates, it innocently creates misinformation. We complain and ask big tech to build better versions. That’s the AI race today with AI organizations vying to win our attention in the form of more tasks that we do with Gen AI.

Read more: The role of ASR in voice bots: Revolutionizing customer interaction through real-time recognition

AI may be the hottest technology right now, but it’s riddled with problems like user data poaching, spreading misinformation, creating deep fakes, harming job security, and much more.

Hence, AI regulation is on its way and its need is real. US states California and Colorado have stepped up to protect consumers and jobs from AI by proposing tough regulations. In Europe too, the EU’s landmark rules on AI will come into effect soon putting up a potential global benchmark.

AI companies, of course, aren’t too thrilled about it. The recent California bill to regulate AI has caused alarm in Silicon Valley. The bill, if passed, will require that companies test the safety of powerful AI technologies before the public accesses them. Also, it will give California’s attorney general the power to sue companies if their technologies are shown to cause serious harm, for instance, mass property damage or human casualties.

British-American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur Andrew Ng says the bill would stifle innovation in open source. This predicts a lobbying storm in the making, since the tech sector complains of such regulations killing innovation.

Still, it begs the question, how much do we trust AI? AI bigwigs like Elon Musk and Open AI have already supported the bill. Although it does seem that big AI companies are already ready to protect their interests. According to Financial Times, OpenAI has expanded its global affairs team from three lobbyists at the start of 2023 to 35 and aims to up this number to 50 by the end of this year.

Will all this regulation curb the wonders we are witnessing because of AI?

The need for regulation arises when big tech gets up to mischief. For example, Meta Platforms has already admitted that it used public Facebook and Instagram posts to train parts of its new Meta AI virtual assistant, though it excluded private posts shared only with family and friends in an effort to respect consumers’ privacy.

An IMF blog post stresses the need for fiscal policy that support human workers and mitigate inequality when it comes to AI, saying that since the future of AI is uncertain, governments must “take an agile approach that prepares them for highly disruptive scenarios,” for example, helping displaced employees find jobs by upskilling them as well as the existing labour force. But at the same time, a specific tax on AI isn’t a good idea, as it could decrease the speed of investment and innovation, declining productivity gains.

“We need to find the balance between over and under regulating. Let’s hope we don’t overregulate and squash innovation at the same time.” — Ranjit Tanaikar, Chief Executive Officer and Board Member at Ness Digital Engineering

As Ranjit Tanaikar, Chief Executive Officer and Board Member at Ness Digital Engineering, a lifecycle digital engineering firm offering digital advisory through scaled engineering services, says, “We need to find the balance between over and under regulating. Let’s hope we don’t overregulate and squash innovation at the same time.”

The EU AI Act, an Example

The EU has been at the forefront of AI regulation. In March, the AI Act, the EU’s new sweeping AI law came in, setting an example for how governments can take precautions against future AI trouble.

The Act places restrictions on AI use cases that pose a high risk to people’s fundamental rights, such as in healthcare, education, and policing. Tech companies will be required to label deepfakes and AI-generated content and notify people when they are interacting with a chatbot or other AI system. The AI Act will also require companies to develop AI-generated media in a way that makes it possible to detect.

The AI Act will set up a new European AI Office where citizens in the EU can submit complaints about AI systems when they suspect they have been harmed by one, and can receive explanations on why the AI systems made decisions they did.

AI companies developing technologies in “high risk” sectors, such as critical infrastructure or healthcare will have new obligations showing better data governance, ensuring human oversight and assessing how these systems will affect people’s rights.

AI companies that are developing “general purpose AI models,” such as language models, will also need to create and keep technical documentation showing how they built the model, how they respect copyright law, and publish a publicly available summary of what training data went into training the AI model. Right now, tech companies are quite tight lipped about the data that goes into their models. 

Companies that don’t comply will face huge fines or their products could be banned from the EU. While free open-source AI models that share every detail of how the model was built, including the model’s architecture, parameters, and weights, will be rewarded by being exempt from many of the obligations of the AI Act.

Are All Govts Seeking to Regulate?

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of AI regulation in the US. Last year, the US released an executive order on AI focusing on standards for the security and safety over the use of AI. 

One of the key reasons why most countries are not in the race to develop laws around AI is because they fear stifling innovation. But considering the staggering number of AI users in India, a framework that balances innovation and protection will be a challenge.

There are governments who don’t want to stop innovation, which they choose over regulation. The Chinese government’s AI regulations are deliberately lenient to maintain the country’s domestic industry growth according to MIT Technology Review.

India hopes to see an AI regulatory framework discussion soon as proposed by Union minister of state for electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrashekhar in February.

Read more: Organizations gear up with AI as AI FOMO sets in but many still hesitate

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that every country needs to have its own artificial intelligence infrastructure to take advantage of the economic potential while protecting its own culture.

However, the reason governments want to curb AI’s freehand usage has some merit. In March, the US House of Representatives set a strict ban on congressional staffers’ use of Microsoft’s Copilot due to the threat of leaking House data to non-House approved cloud services

Regulated AI is Responsible AI

Meanwhile, tech rushes ahead. Gen AI is in. Though, is it wise to rush in with Gen AI usage when regulations have not been set?

We, as consumers, have a limited grasp of generalized AI. It performs tasks for us, and we appreciate it. However, it can also generate false information, exhibit biases, and produce unintentional misinformation. We voice our concerns and request improvements from large technology companies. This is the current state of the AI race, with organizations competing to capture our interest through more tasks executed by generalized AI. But regulation is coming to AI, and the wise thing to do is work in tandem with it by keeping the human element relevant.