As Europe moves closer to blanket rules regarding its use, CCI’s Jennifer L. Gaskin explores the evolving compliance and regulatory picture around artificial intelligence, the technology everyone seems to be using (but that we’re also all afraid of?).
Many observers have compared the current legal and regulatory state surrounding artificial intelligence to the Wild West, an era heavy on gunplay and light on rules.
It’s an apt comparison, but not because there were no laws in the so-called Wild West or because no laws govern AI now. (Just ask Rite Aid or Clearview AI whether regulatory agencies are closely monitoring how companies use artificial intelligence.) Rather, it’s the fractured nature of laws being applied to AI or even written specifically for AI that are the proper analog for an American frontier where justice was meted out by roving judges, sheriffs and bounty hunters, though the authorities setting guardrails on AI are usually far less trigger-happy.
In November, just over a year after OpenAI’s release of its popular ChatGPT generative AI chatbot, the European Union made its opening regulatory move, agreeing on landmark legislation, the AI Act, a measure first proposed in 2021 but rewritten multiple times as AI continued advancing by leaps and bounds.
The act, which cleared one…
