The Guardian - Rishi Sunak’s AI plan has no teeth – and once again, big tech is ready to exploit that
Europe director Max von Thun coauthored an article warning that the UK, as well as regulators around the world, needed to more effectively legislate the emerging AI space, rather than let Big Tech firms take the lead.
This month, the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, convened government representatives, AI companies and experts at Bletchley Park – the historic home of Allied code-breaking during the second world war – to discuss how the much-hyped technology can be deployed safely.
The summit has been rightly criticised on a number of grounds, including prioritising input from big tech over civil society voices, and fixating on far-fetched existential risks over tangible everyday harms. But the summit’s biggest failure – itself a direct result of those biases – was that it had nothing meaningful to say about reining in the dominant corporations that pose the biggest threat to our safety.
The summit’s key “achievements” consisted of a vague joint communique warning of the risks from so-called frontier AI models and calling for “inclusive global dialogue” plus an (entirely voluntary) agreement between governments and large AI companies on safety testing. Yet neither of these measures have any real teeth, and what’s worse, they give powerful corporations a privileged seat at the table when it comes to shaping the debate on AI regulation.
Big tech is currently promoting the idea that its exclusive control over AI models is the only path to protecting society from major harms. In the words of an open letter signed by 1,500 civil society actors, accepting this premise is “naive at best, dangerous at worst”.
Governments truly serious about ensuring that AI is used in the public interest would pursue a very different approach. Instead of noble-sounding statements of intent and backroom deals with industry, what is really needed are tough measures targeting that corporate power itself. Aggressive enforcement of competition policy and tough regulatory obligations for dominant gatekeepers are key.
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