The order builds on voluntary commitments already made by 15 technology companies and its signing comes at a time when the European Union is nearing final passage of a sweeping law to rein in AI harms. Countries, including India, are becoming more cognisant of the need for AI regulation as the technology becomes more ubiquitous and has the potential to be just as dynamic as it can be dangerous.
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Top 10 highlights of the Executive Order:
- Requires developers of the most powerful AI systems to share safety test results and other critical information with the US government.
- Develop standards, tools, and tests to help ensure that AI systems are safe, secure, and trustworthy.
- Protect Americans from AI-enabled fraud and deception by establishing standards and best practices for detecting AI-generated content and authenticating official content.
- Protect Americans’ privacy by prioritizing federal support for accelerating the development and use of privacy-preserving techniques—including ones that use cutting-edge AI and let AI systems be trained while preserving the privacy of the training data.
- Evaluate how agencies collect and use commercially available information—including information they procure from data brokers—and strengthen privacy guidance for federal agencies to account for AI risks.
- Provide clear guidance to landlords, federal benefit programmes, and federal contractors to keep AI algorithms from being used to exacerbate discrimination.
- Address algorithmic discrimination through training, technical assistance, and coordination between the Department of Justice and federal civil rights offices on best practices for investigating and prosecuting civil rights violations related to AI.
- Ensure fairness throughout the criminal justice system by developing best practices on the use of AI in sentencing, parole and probation, pretrial release and detention, risk assessments, surveillance, crime forecasting and predictive policing, and forensic analysis.
- Guidance to be issued for agencies’ use of AI, including clear standards to protect rights and safety, improve AI procurement, and strengthen AI deployment.
- Accelerate the rapid hiring of AI professionals
How will the US move to pass the executive order impact India?
The Biden administration has consulted widely on AI governance frameworks over the past several months, before issuing the executive order, including with India, especially given India’s leadership as Chair of the Global Partnership on AI. Jaspreet Bindra, managing director and founder of Tech Whisperer told ET that this order will put pressure on all nations, including India, to come up with their own AI safety framework and regulations.
“India does prefer to participate in a global framework for such technologies, which are inherently global. India has the opportunity to take a leading position on AI safety and privacy, especially from a Global South and Eastern viewpoint, and should grasp this. One option will be to expand the Data Protection Bill and legislation to include AI and Generative AI safety principles and laws,” he said.
What can India pick up from the US executive order?
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Bindra said there are three aspects that India can look to incorporate in its own AI regulation:
- BigTech and other big foundational model developers like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, etc., must divulge the results of the ‘red teaming’ safety tests that they must do on each new model, before it is released to the public. “This is a big one, almost like drug test results that pharma companies do with the FDA,” he said.
- These results will be vetted to a high bar on standards by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This brings it on par with chemical, biological, nuclear infra testing, Bindra added.
- AI-generated content must be watermarked in order to clearly mark AI generated content. “This was expected and very welcome for everyone – educators, social media, lawyers, etc. – and should help discern deep fakes,” Bindra said.
One aspect that India is ahead in this is with regard to privacy. The Supreme Court has declared privacy to be a fundamental right in India and this gains significance as President Biden talks about calling on Congress to pass “bipartisan data privacy legislation.” Bindra said this was crucial as privacy is at the heart of AI and data usage.
