The United States

AI really entered the political conversation in the US in 2023. But it wasn’t just debate. There was also action, culminating in President Biden’s executive order on AI at the end of October—a sprawling directive calling for more transparency and new standards.

Through this activity, a US flavor of AI policy began to emerge: one that’s friendly to the AI industry, with an emphasis on best practices, a reliance on different agencies to craft their own rules, and a nuanced approach of regulating each sector of the economy differently.

Next year will build on the momentum of 2023, and many items detailed in Biden’s executive order will be enacted. We’ll also be hearing a lot about the new US AI Safety Institute, which will be responsible for executing most of the policies called for in the order.

From a congressional standpoint, it’s not clear what exactly will happen. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer recently signaled that new laws may be coming in addition to the executive order. There are already several legislative proposals in play that touch various aspects of AI, such as transparency, deepfakes, and platform accountability. But it’s not clear which, if any, of these already proposed bills will gain traction next year.

What we can expect, though, is an approach that grades types and uses of AI by how much risk they pose—a framework similar to the EU’s AI Act. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has already proposed such a framework that each sector and agency will now have to put into practice, says Chris Meserole, executive director of the Frontier Model Forum, an industry lobbying body.

Another thing is clear: the US presidential election in 2024 will color much of the discussion on AI regulation. As we see in generative AI’s impact on social media platforms and misinformation, we can expect the debate around how we prevent harms from this technology to be shaped by what happens during election season.

Europe

The European Union has just agreed on the AI Act, the world’s first sweeping AI law.

After intense technical tinkering and official approval by European countries and the EU Parliament in the first half of 2024, the AI Act will kick in fairly quickly. In the most optimistic scenario, bans on certain AI uses could apply as soon as the end of the year.

This all means 2024 will be a busy year for the AI sector as it prepares to comply with the new rules. Although most AI applications will get a free pass from the AI Act, companies developing foundation models and applications that are considered to pose a “high risk” to fundamental rights, such as those meant to be used in sectors like education, health care, and policing, will have to meet new EU standards. In Europe, the police will not be allowed to use the technology in public places, unless they get court approval first for specific purposes such as fighting terrorism, preventing human trafficking, or finding a missing person.

Other AI uses will be entirely banned in the EU, such as creating facial recognition databases like Clearview AI’s or using emotion recognition technology at work or in schools. The AI Act will require companies to be more transparent about how they develop their models, and it will make them, and organizations using high-risk AI systems, more accountable for any harms that result.

Companies developing foundation models—the models upon which other AI products, such as GPT-4,  are based—will have to comply with the law within one year of the time it enters into force. Other tech companies have two years to implement the rules.

To meet the new requirements, AI companies will have to be more thoughtful about how they build their systems, and document their work more rigorously so it can be audited. The law will require companies to be more transparent about how their models have been trained and will ensure that AI systems deemed high-risk are trained and tested with sufficiently representative data sets in order to minimize biases, for example.

The EU believes that the most powerful AI models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini, could pose a “systemic” risk to citizens and thus need additional work to meet EU standards. Companies must take steps to assess and mitigate risks and ensure that the systems are secure, and they will be required to report serious incidents and share details on their energy consumption. It will be up to companies to assess whether their models are powerful enough to fall into this category.

Open-source AI companies are exempted from most of the AI Act’s transparency requirements, unless they are developing models as computing-intensive as GPT-4. Not complying with rules could lead to steep fines or cause their products to be blocked from the EU.

The EU is also working on another bill, called the AI Liability Directive, which will ensure that people who have been harmed by the technology can get financial compensation. Negotiations for that are still ongoing and will likely pick up this year.

Some other countries are taking a more hands-off approach. For example, the UK, home of Google DeepMind, has said it does not intend to regulate AI in the short term. However, any company outside the EU, the world’s second-largest economy, will still have to comply with the AI Act if it wants to do business in the trading bloc.

Columbia University law professor Anu Bradford has called this the “Brussels effect”—by being the first to regulate, the EU is able to set the de facto global standard, shaping the way the world does business and develops technology. The EU successfully achieved this with its strict data protection regime, the GDPR, which has been copied everywhere from California to India. It hopes to repeat the trick when it comes to AI.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/05/1086203/whats-next-ai-regulation-2024/

Stephanie Arnett/MITTR | Envato