Politico – Are These States About to Make a Big Mistake on AI?
This op-ed – authored by CDT’s Matt Scherer and Grace Gedye, policy analyst at Consumer Reports – first appeared in Politico on April 30, 2024.A portion of the text has been pasted below.
At first glance, these bills seem to lay out a solid foundation of transparency requirements and bias testing for AI-driven decision systems. Unfortunately, all of the bills contain loopholes that would make it too easy for companies to avoid accountability.
For example, many of the bills would cover only AI systems that are “specifically developed” to be a “controlling” or “substantial” factor in a high-stakes decision. Cutting through the jargon, this would mean that companies could completely evade the law simply by putting fine print at the bottom of their technical documentation or marketing materials saying that their product wasn’t designed to be the main reason for a decision and should only be used under human supervision.
Sound policy would also address the fact that we often have no idea if a company is using AI to make key decisions about our lives, much less what personal information and other factors the program considers.
Solid regulation would require businesses to clearly and directly tell you what decision an AI program is being used to make, and what information it will employ to do it. It would also require companies to provide an explanation if their AI system decides you aren’t a good fit for a job, a college, a home loan or other important benefits. But under most of these bills, the most a company would have to do is post a vague notice in a hidden corner of their website.
Coalition Urges Senate Not to Let Companies Waive Financial Regulations for AI
CDT joined AI Now Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, and several organizations dedicated to tech policy, consumer protection, and civil rights in a letter to Senate leadership and the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee opposing the “AI Innovation Labs” language in Sec. 10509 of the CLARITY Act.
As concern about risks and harms related to AI systems continue to grow, a growing chorus of policymakers, industry leaders, and advocates have called for independent AI assessments. This explainer provides an overview of recent proposals for third-party assessment in the United States, including state and federal legislation, executive actions, and industry proposals.
Having third parties assess AI systems might seem like common sense, but crafting effective policies toward this goal can be devilishly tricky. A poorly-constructed ecosystem for third-party assessment could easily fail to consider the most consequential mechanisms of risk, neglect the AI harms that most impact people, or do more to protect AI companies than people.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
