Three Laws

Kaminski on Regulating the Risks of AI @MargotKaminski @BULawReview

Margot E. Kaminski, University of Colorado Law School; Yale Information Society Project; University of Colorado, Boulder, Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Enterprise, is publishing Regulating the Risks of AI in volume 103 of the Boston University Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Companies and governments now use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a wide range of settings. But using AI leads to well-known risks—that is, not yet realized but potentially catastrophic future harms that arguably present challenges for a traditional liability model. It is thus unsurprising that lawmakers in both the United States and the European Union (EU) have turned to the tools of risk regulation for governing AI systems. This Article observes that constructing AI harms as risks is a choice with consequences. Risk regulation comes with its own policy baggage: a set of tools and troubles that have emerged in other fields. Moreover, there are at least four models for risk regulation, each with divergent goals and methods. Emerging conflicts over AI risk regulation illustrate the tensions that emerge when regulators employ one model of risk regulation, while stakeholders call for another. This Article is the first to examine and compare a number of recently proposed and enacted AI risk regulation regimes. It asks whether risk regulation is, in fact, the right approach. It closes with suggestions for addressing two types of shortcomings: failures to consider other tools in the risk regulation toolkit (including conditional licensing, liability, and design mandates), and shortcomings that stem from the nature of risk regulation itself (including the inherent difficulties of non-quantifiable harms, and the dearth of mechanisms for public or stakeholder input).

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Abbott and Shulov on The Revolution Has Arrived: AI Authorship and Copyright Law @DrRyanAbbott

Ryan Abbott, University of Surrey School of Law; University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, and Elizabeth Shubov, The Cantellus Group, have published The Revolution Has Arrived: AI Authorship and Copyright Law. Here is the abstract.

Very recently, due largely to breakthroughs in deep learning technologies, AI has begun stepping into the shoes of human content generators and making valuable creative works at scale. Before the end of the decade, a significant amount of art, literature, music, software, and web content will likely be created by AI rather than traditional human authors. Yet the law, as it has so often historically, lags this technological evolution by prohibiting copyright protection for AI-generated works. The predominant narrative holds that even if AI can automate creativity, that this activity is not the right sort of thing to protect, and that protection could even harm human artists. AI-generated works challenge beliefs about human exceptionalism and the normative foundations of copyright law, which until now have offered something for everyone. Copyright can be about ethics and authors and protecting the sweat of a brow and personality rights. Copyright can also be about money and the public interest and offering incentives to create and disseminate content. But copyright cannot have it all with AI authors—there is valuable output being generated, but by authors with no interests to protect. This forces a reevaluation of copyright law’s history and purpose. This article argues that American copyright law is, and has been traditionally, primarily about benefiting the public interest rather than benefiting authors directly. As a result, AI-generated works are precisely the sort of thing the system was designed to protect. Protection will encourage people to develop and use creative AI and to produce and disseminate new works. Taken further, attributing authorship to AI when an AI has functionally done the work of a traditional author will promote transparency, efficient allocations of rights, and even counterintuitively protect human authors. Exploring the challenges associated with AI-generated works is an opportunity to rethink basic tenets of copyright law like originality, how the law should accommodate advances in technology, and even how to think more broadly about the rules that apply to people, machines, and other sorts of artificial authors.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Brownsword on We the Robots? Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law by Simon Chesterman (Book Review) @KCL_Law @ProfChesterman

Roger Brownsword, King's College London School of Law, has published Book Review: We the Robots? Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law by Simon Chesterman at 2022 Singapore Journal of Legal Studies 252. Here is the abstract.

Debates about the law, regulation, and governance of robots, artificial intelligence ('AI'), and machine learning have been dominated by voices from North America, Europe, and Australia. While Singapore has hosted conferences at which these matters have been discussed, and while it is clearly an interested party in relation to these debates, a distinctively Singaporean voice has yet to be heard—or, at any rate, it had not been heard prior to the publication of Simon Chesterman’s stimulating book.

Download the review from SSRN at the link.