I am attending Global Revolution 24 at the University of Nottingham. This is always an interesting conference and a good platform to catch up with colleagues and friends from all over the world. I spent Day 1 attending the four workshops of the AI and procurement stream that Jessica Tillipman (GW Law) and I co-organised. This was a day full of insightful and engaging discussions, and I took a lot of ideas for further research and policy work, including on the need for a different approach to conflicts of interest that can be embedded in the tech (more on that some other time).
My presentation featured a unicorn metaphor to synthesise my views that the current approach to the regulation of public sector AI adoption through contract and, in particular, through the EU AI Act and the pilot model AI contractual clauses is bound to fail and requires a rethink. Like ‘haunting for a unicorn’, pursuing ‘trustworthy AI’ is a major challenge because we are after something that we have never seen and can only describe on the basis of our imagination. The absence of clear metrics to express open-ended concepts, such as fairness, and the impossibility of designing effective contract-based governance for the socio-technical embedding of the AI, inevitably create excessive indefinition in the regulatory approach and leave it open to commercial determination and regulatory tunnelling.
Moreover, the ‘regulation by contract’ strategy based on a skeletal blueprint (the model AI clauses) that requires significant amounts of technical and commercial expertise for public buyers to fill in is like asking a child to copy an outline of a unicorn and colour it in. The outcome may be endearing or even artsy. But it may hardly resemble a unicorn, which we may only see by stretching our imagination. And deploying ‘AI on AI’ will not solve the situation because ‘technical fixes’ cannot make up for the indeterminacy of the regulatory data and goals—much like an automated description of the unicorns drawn by kids (below) only approximated the target by identifying on picture as that of a horse, and the other as that of a child!
