Regulating AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already being used in many different sectors and industries globally. These areas include government (help desks, sending demand letters), health (predicative diagnosis), law (predicative policing and sentencing), education (facial recognition), finance (for share trading), advertising (social media), retail (recommendations), transport (drones), smart services (like electricity meters), and so on. At this stage, the AI in use or being proposed is ‘narrow' AI and not ‘general' AI, which means that it has been designed for a specific purpose, say, to advise on sentencing levels or to select potential candidates for interview, rather than being designed to learn and do new things, like a human. The question we need to explore is not whether regulation of AI is needed but how such regulation can be achieved. This chapter examines which existing regulations can apply to AI, which will need to be amended, and which areas might need new regulation to be introduced. Both national and international regulation will be discussed; Australia is the main focus.