How New Laws Might Change How Enterprises Use AI

With the rise in artificial intelligence and machine learning, governments are looking for ways to regulate the industry. There are many reasons why regulation might be on the horizon. There has been some movement in data privacy, which will only get more widespread as time goes on. There are data privacy laws in California and the European Union. These laws are quite restrictive to content publishers, and it has affected the industry as a whole. Data is as valuable as oil in this current paradigm, and it is only going to increase as time goes on. The reason it is so valuable is that you can extract a lot of useful insights and make a lot of money from the data. The companies that do the best job of extracting insights from data will be the best ones in the future. It is why it is crucial to understand potential new laws on the horizon and how they might affect enterprises.

The Governance of Artificial Intelligence

The majority of artificial intelligence algorithms and machine learning models are black boxes. That is to say; only the creators know exactly what goes into making the decisions. For example, only Google knows what goes into its search engine algorithms. It is the same thing for Facebook and other companies. This poses a significant threat in the eyes of many governments. There’s also the fact that artificial intelligence could create systems that can be used for evil. Because of this, many governments see regulation as the only answer to these potential threats. It makes a lot of sense for them to regulate the industry as much as possible to prevent these things from happening. However, as of now, artificial intelligence algorithms and data are proprietary to companies, and they see it as intellectual property.

Risks to Private Data

Artificial intelligence and private data can be dangerous when combined. For example, Facebook did experiments where it was able to influence the emotions of the people they tested their algorithms on. Artificial intelligence has the potential to do a lot of bad things in the future. There’s also the funny case of the father who was upset at a store for sending his daughter a flyer for pregnancy sales. However, he later found out that his daughter was pregnant. The store showed that you could use artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict behaviors before the parents even knew anything. Private data is only going to become more important in the future. There will be laws to govern what you can and cannot do with private data concerning machine learning and artificial intelligence.

AI Can Be Misused

As you can see from the examples above, artificial intelligence algorithms are prone to abuse. It is only going to get worse as the industry matures and compute gets even more accessible. With those things, artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms will be integrated into every type of application imaginable. The main problem right now is that no one truly knows how this regulation will work. It is easy to regulate things like the sale of tobacco, but it is more challenging to regulate code and algorithms. Code and algorithms are essentially ideas, and these might pose a problem to governments.

AI Projects Need to Be Transparent

The major issue will come from transparency. Transparency is a big problem because it poses a lot of issues for governments and companies. For example, if a company is forced to release its algorithm, how will that affect its competitive chances. The industry is moving quickly, and there will need to be more debate as we figure out how regulation must be applied to artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms.