Interoperability in global legislations around artificial intelligence will be among the most crucial aspects going ahead, especially for smaller businesses who may find it difficult to navigate conflicting and complicated regulations around the world, said Markham Erickson, vice president, government affairs and public policy at Google’s Centers for Excellence. In an interaction with Soumyarendra Barik & Anil Sasi, he also spoke about safe harbour protections for generative AI platforms, regulatory challenges to AI, and how Google’s relationship could change with news publishers going forward. Edited excerpts:
There are parallels to the mid-’90s at the beginning of the commercial internet, where stakeholders are having to get together and think about the norms that should apply, and how existing laws need to be amended to account for the new technology. And in the mid-’90s, the United States took the lead… saying we should have a hands-off approach to the internet to let this nascent industry develop. And then that was followed by Europe with the e-commerce directive.
The EU did start the AI Act process four years ago… So they’re certainly leaning into regulation. The US had the executive order and we were encouraged by that because it directs the agencies to develop regulations to explore how AI affects their remits, and that it’s done under this hub and spoke model, which was first endorsed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The concept behind it is that governments should have some central AI technical expertise, and then that should branch out to the different agencies that have responsibilities in their spaces to protect and to oversee their area of the economy.
India will be a global leader in the conversation as well. It has the workforce, the university systems, the technology stack, and the population to be rightfully a leading part of the conversation. India will have its own way of thinking about how to approach the regulations… and hopefully they’re interoperable with each other because if they’re not interoperable it’ll be first and foremost the small businesses that suffer because they won’t they won’t have the capacity to be able to navigate conflicting or overlapping laws.
I understand the objective of wanting to help small businesses and give them the ability to compete and reach global audiences and to leverage the resources that the country has. In the data protection Act that was recently notified, that was a positive example of a framework that allows for cross-border data sharing done responsibly because it’s a recognition from the government that the data has to go both ways. It can’t just stay within the country, but it also has to benefit from data coming into the country, and that there’s a shared benefit in that regard.
In 2018, when we announced that we were going to be an AI-first company, and we saw the possibilities of AI to solve a lot of really thorny issues, to create really innovative products and services for people that would be game-changing and life enhancing in many ways, we also saw that it would create challenges… We felt a responsibility to have our own set of internal regulations.
So when it comes to the engagement with governments, we think it’s appropriate to start at a principles’ layer. You can have rules that govern the use of how you will develop technology, and those rules that are meant to ensure that we are responsible and are not inconsistent with innovation.
And as India thinks about its domestic legislation one thing that, in conversations I had, is not to think of this as you get one chance to get it right and then you’re done. This should be an iterative process where we don’t have to think about whether we need a regulatory framework, and that shouldn’t stop one from developing a rule in a particular area that we know there should be a regulation over.
While AI will create many jobs, there will be some jobs that are disrupted and displaced. When the globalisation trend really started happening, every government recognised it would displace jobs, but they did not do that much about it. We have a moment now where we know, even though there will be many jobs that will be created, there will be some jobs that will be disrupted. So we need to work with governments to try to have a more AI-skilled workforce.
I think if we don’t have more, if you don’t have globally interoperable laws. It will really harm small businesses from being able to reach a global marketplace. India’s got a lot of small businesses, but if laws in Europe are not interoperable with laws in India, it’s going to be very hard for a small business to navigate that complexity.
Privacy is a perfect example of this. In the United States, there is no national privacy law, and what’s happening is that states are filling the vacuum by passing state privacy laws. And they’re not consistent with each other in every situation. Now, we’re going to have to figure out how to navigate that. But it’s very difficult for a small business to figure that out. Then you worry about companies that will just give up complying with that, or they’ll not engage in a certain business.
And how that manifests itself at a global level is if we don’t have agreements about the sharing of data in a trusted way, in a safe way, and a country decides that it’s going to require that all of the data has to stay within its country and no data can leave its country, then the businesses within that jurisdiction are not going to be able to take advantage of a marketplace that goes beyond its borders.
The theory behind safe harbour is very durable today. It ensures that there’s free speech on the Internet… and the empirical evidence around safe harbour shows its economic value proposition, that other technology companies can plug into a system and be able to utilise the system because the intermediary is incentivised to allow that to happen.
So how that manifests itself in AI, I think, is TBD. I would approach it with that lens of both ensuring there’s incentive for innovation, incentive for free speech, but also ensure that there’s some responsibility.
But when it comes to generative AI platforms compared to the intermediaries that we know today, like social media sites, aren’t the lines blurry since the former is not just hosting content anymore, but there is a lot more proprietary tech around it? Does that put perhaps more sort of legal liabilities on companies?
As a pragmatic matter, we feel a sense of responsibility to ensure that the, that the development of Bard is responsible… One of them is to ensure that there’s no unfair bias in the system, and, and that the systems are safe, and that you can test for that safety.
Google has built up financial relationships with news companies in some countries, to incentivise them for their content. As you integrate Bard with Google Search more going ahead, with the initial space getting occupied by Bard’s response to a query, how could your relationship with news publishers change?
Generative AI is a consequential transition, to move into a full AI ecosystem… There is a tremendous amount of innovation that’s happening and a tremendous amount of competition. If given a fair chance for users to have the best search experience that will also create value for the ecosystem. How all of the various ways value will be created is still going to have to be worked out because this is still early days. But it’s in our interest to ensure that the entire ecosystem feels valued from AI.
YouTube creators will be able to create new and innovative products and be compensated for those products… And then the way that AI benefits other parts of the ecosystem and web publishers… We have some ideas, but we don’t know all of the ways that that’s going to happen.
When we launched our AI generative products in May, we said publishers should have the right and ability to control the use of their publication for large language models. We worked to create a technology that gives publishers the ability to opt out of having their publication being used for Bard. And we’ll respect that…
Soumyarendra Barik is Special Correspondent with The Indian Express and reports on the intersection of technology, policy and society. With over five years of newsroom experience, he has reported on issues of gig workers’ rights, privacy, India’s prevalent digital divide and a range of other policy interventions that impact big tech companies. He once also tailed a food delivery worker for over 12 hours to quantify the amount of money they make, and the pain they go through while doing so. In his free time, he likes to nerd about watches, Formula 1 and football. … Read More 
Soumyarendra Barik<div>Soumyarendra Barik is Special Correspondent with The Indian Expre… read more
Anil SasiAnil Sasi is National Business Editor with the Indian Express and writ… read more