Principles alone won’t be enough to protect citizens’ human rights, privacy and safety

Response to the government’s new AI white paper on the use of artificial intelligence in the UK.

Ellen Judson, Head of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM) at Demos, said:

“The Government’s commitment to acting to support the development of better and more responsible AI technologies is welcome, and a principles-based approach that puts fairness, accountability and transparency at the heart is the right one.

“But setting out principles alone is not enough without a meaningful framework for them to turn into practice. Without the teeth of legal obligations, this is an approach which will result in a patchwork of regulatory guidance that will do little to fundamentally shift the incentives that lead to risky and unethical uses of AI.

“If the Government is serious about ensuring that AI is trustworthy, responsibly used, and protects citizens’ human rights, privacy and safety, it cannot shy away in the name of protecting innovation from empowering regulators more strongly to oversee how AI is being developed and deployed.”