Artificial Intelligence is Here to Stay.
Author: Kelvin Kamau.
“For more than 250 years the fundamental drivers of economic growth have been technological innovations. The most important of these are what economists call general-purpose technologies – a category that includes the steam engine, electricity, and the internal combustion engine. The most important general-purpose technology of our era is artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning.” ~ Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.
Intelligence is the ability to acquire knowledge and use it to perform certain specific tasks. When machines deduce such knowledge and act on particular situations, this is referred as artificial intelligence. These actions must be done according to different circumstances other than rote. In other words, imitating human behaviour. The ability of a machine to perform these tasks entails three basic cognitive skills- learning, reasoning, and self-correction. Artificial Intelligence involves algorithms, machine learning, and natural language processing.
To understand our present, and predict the future we need to understand our past. The age of computing dates back to the 1830s when Charles Babbage, Countess of Lovelace and Augusta Auda Byron developed the first designs of a computer. More complex developments took place over the years, including neural networks, machine learning, Deep learning Systems, Generative Adversarial Networks, and finally Language and Image Recognition Capabilities that are the backbone of the current Chatbots, like OpenAIs, Google AI, etc.
These machines have to be fed with an avalanche of data, music, image video, speech, and text to process and predict the answers to provide once asked by a user of the program. These systems acquire the data from newspapers, social media accounts, and any other data fed into them. The aggregation of large amounts of data poses risks of privacy infringement.
As such, several legal questions on the issues arise on data privacy and surveillance. Do these systems have the right to enter data from newspapers without authorization from media houses? This is bearing in mind that there are no legal frameworks to compensate media houses when their data is used by keying in data into these ChatBots. This is one of the issues for determination and the ruling of the court will be locus classicus in a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft by The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun Sentinel, San Jose Mercury News, Denver Post, Orange County Register and St Paul Pioneer Press.
These ChatBots scrap information on personal data from personal social media accounts. What is the legal basis to protect an individual’s data from AI systems?
Governments and corporations are in check for using AI for comprehensive surveillance and social Control. We have heard this story before, Edward Snowden hello…
AI poses social and ethical issues. AI is seen to be contributing towards racial and gender biases. This stems from the algorithm development process, training datasets and AI-generated decision-making. For instance, a program will translate the “tailor” using the female-gendered word and a doctor a male-gendered word. Moreover, AI poses grave psychological issues such as AI Chatbot suicides.
AI has been used to spread widespread misinformation. More often than not, the vulnerable groups in society have become victims of fraud due to crafted AI voices that mimic their loved ones. Cases have been lost in court due to AI-powered Chatbots giving false information to clients, as was in the case of Moffat V Air Canada, where the courts held: “a company can be liable for negligent misrepresentations made by a Chatbot on a publicly available commercial website.” In Mata V Avianca, Inc. the plaintiff's attorney was heavily sanctioned for quoting fake citations from a Chatbot and relying on the submissions despite being given a warning.
Serious legal questions exist with regard to Intellectual Property involving AI-generated content. Copyright and patent laws have ostensibly failed to keep pace with the recent developments in AI.
The AI revolution is a global thing with grave consequences if no regulation is provided in the near future. The European Union is marking these developments remarkably as part of its digital strategy. The first regulatory framework was proposed in April 2021 by the European Commission. In order to ensure fairness, transparency, traceability, non-discrimination and environmental friendliness, the European Parliament enacted the AI Act. These are regulations for both the users and the providers. The spirit of the drafters of this legislation was mitigating the different degrees of risks that come with these technologies. These have different limbs, unacceptable risks and higher risks. Unacceptable risks include inter alia; cognitive behavioural manipulation of people or vulnerable groups, social scoring, biometric identification and stratification, and real-time and remote biometric identification systems. The high risks include products falling in the EU product safety legislation which includes food and non-food products such as aviation and lifts etc, and AI Systems in distinct areas such as education, infrastructural development management, employment management systems, law enforcement, migration at the time when we are experiencing unprecedented developments in such spaces. AI Chatbots are enforced to comply with the European Union transparency requirements and the existing copyright law. Complex AI systems will have to go through a thorough assessment of the risks and compliance measures to meet the standards and regulations set in the Act. In Africa, three countries are making laudable efforts to come up with governance laws on AI: Egypt, Mauritius and Kenya. We inadvertently are susceptible to suffering the same catastrophes as countries that are making tremendous changes to make sure that this does not happen. We cannot as a country be left behind. There are no concise legal frameworks in Kenya involving AI. The closest we have come in this area is the enactment of the Data Protection Act of 2019. The Robotics Society of Kenya proposed a draft Bill to the National Assembly, proposing the creation body to regulate Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the use of robotics.
Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. We must compound the benefits of these important and life-saving taking technologies. That notwithstanding, catastrophes of this revolution are equally dire. We must therefore develop legislation and stable governance policies to keep pace to protect from control, privacy infringement, biases, “Deep fakes” and uncontrollable self-aware AI.
