A bill to regulate Artificial Intelligence(AI) will be one of 35 bills to be included in the King’s Speech tomorrow according to the Financial Times. The Bill will seek to enhance the legal safeguards surrounding the most cutting-edge AI technologies, according to people briefed on the plans.
The 2024 Labour election manifesto contained pledges to support the development of AI. It stated Labour would ensure their “industrial strategy supports the development of the AI sector and removes planning barriers to new datacentres.” The Bill seeks to follow through on the manifesto pledge to regulate AI but only in some cases:
“Labour will ensure the safe development and use of AI models by introducing binding regulation on the handful of companies developing the most powerful AI models and by banning the creation of sexually explicit deepfakes.”
The Bill is likely to focus on the production of large language models (LLMs), the general-purpose technology that underlies AI products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
It is a departure from the previous government’s approach which was not to place AI regulation on a statutory footing but to make use of “regulators’ domain-specific expertise to tailor the implementation of the principles to the specific context in which AI is used.”
The new Bill follows the EU’s tougher approach. The EU AI Act was published in the Official Journal of the EU last Friday (July 12th 2024) firing the gun for the enforcement countdown. It will be on the EU statute books on 1st August 2024 and then become enforceable in stages.
The main provisions of Act can be read here. In summary, the Act sets out comprehensive rules for AI applications, including a risk-based system to address potential threats to health and safety, and human rights. The Act will ban certain AI applications that pose an “unacceptable risk,” including real-time and remote biometric identification systems such as facial recognition. Additionally, it will impose strict obligations on those considered “high risk,” encompassing AI used in EU-regulated product safety categories, for example, cars and medical devices. These obligations include adherence to data governance standards, transparency rules, and the incorporation of human oversight mechanisms.
It will be interesting to read the text of the new Bill when it is published especially how it overlaps with the provisions on the UK GDPR.
Our AI Act workshop will help you understand the new law in detail and its interaction with the UK’s objectives and strategy for AI regulation.
