Ritu Jyoti, group vice president at IDC for AI research, said it’s important to note is that the roadmap does not specifically propose actual legislation around AI, “but the document serves more to plant a stake in a lot of general ideas.”
“As we all know, the AI industry is moving faster than the rest of the technology sector and outpaces the federal government by several orders of magnitude,” Jyoti said. “Although the priorities listed in the document are judicious, it makes one wonder if any concrete action could be taken in a foreseeable timeline. Perhaps some actionable guidance for copyright concerns and which would immediately require safety evaluations for all current and future AI models would have been nice.”
In March, the European Union passed the world’s first comprehensive AI law, aimed at regulating the makers and vendors of AI technology. The European Union AI Act received an overwhelmingly favorable vote. The law created a number of safeguards on general purpose AI, limits the use of biometric identification systems by law enforcement, bans online social scoring and AI to manipulate or exploit user vulnerabilities, and gives consumers the right to launch complaints and get “meaningful explanations” from AI providers.
In the US, the Bipartisan Senate AI Working Group — comprising Sens. Schumer, Mike Rounds (R-SD), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), and Todd Young (R-IN) — released an AI policy roadmap summarizing their findings. The report also lays out policy topics the group believes merit bipartisan committee consideration in Congress.
The AI Working Group is not the first to attempt to wrangle in the fast pace of generative AI (genAI) and general AI development and adoption. In February, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) enlisted more than 200 companies and organizations to participate in the AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC) to devise guidelines for ensuring the safety of AI systems.
Amazon.com, Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, the Free Software Foundation, and Visa are all members of AISIC, as well as several major developers of AI tools, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
