2nd Australian Responsible AI Index launched - calls for government to regulate sooner rather than later

Today marked the unveiling of the 2nd Australian Responsible AI Index, accompanied by urgent appeals for the government to intervene and curb the potential misuse of artificial intelligence (AI). 

The Australian Financial Review provided comprehensive coverage of this critical topic, revealing that a mere 3% of Australian companies are managing the adoption and continuous use of AI in a responsible manner.

As AI permeates almost every facet of business operations, it is crucial that its management and regulation extend beyond vendors and IT teams, ensuring responsible policies are in place for both the business and society as a whole.

The Index report disclosed several key findings:

• The average Responsible AI Index score for Australian organisations has remained stagnant at 62 out of 100 since 2021.
• While a significant 82% of respondents believe they are adopting best-practice approaches to AI, a closer look reveals that only 24% are taking conscious steps to guarantee the responsible development of their AI systems.
• There has been a growth in organisations with an enterprise-wide AI strategy linked to their broader business strategy, with the figure rising from 51% in 2021 to 60%.
• Among those organisations, only 34% have a CEO who is personally committed to spearheading the AI strategy.
• Organisations with CEO-led AI strategies boast a higher RAI Index score of 66, compared to a score of 61 for those without direct CEO involvement.
• A total of 61% of organisations now recognise that the advantages of adopting a responsible AI approach outweigh the associated costs.

The Responsible AI Index serves as a timely reminder for the Australian government to act swiftly in the face of these findings, reinforcing the need for a more responsible approach towards AI implementation across the board.

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Italy bans ChatGPT (over privacy concerns)

As the first major action by a nation to limit the spread and use of generative AI, Italy's government has taken the step to formally ban ChatGPT use not only by government employees, but by all Italians.

As reported by the BBC, "the Italian data-protection authority said there were privacy concerns relating to the model, which was created by US start-up OpenAI and is backed by Microsoft. The regulator said it would ban and investigate OpenAI 'with immediate effect'."

While I believe this concern is rooted in a misunderstanding as to how ChatGPT operates - it is a pre-trained AI, that doesn't integrate or learn from the prompts and content entered into it - given that OpenAI does broadly review this injected data for improving the AI's responses means there is enough of a concern for a regulator to want to explore it further.

Certainly I would not advise entering content that is private, confidential or classified into ChatGPT, but except in very specific cases, there's little to no privacy risk of your data being reused or somehow repurposed in nefarious ways.

In contrast the Singaporean government has built a tool using ChatGPT's API to give 90,000 public servants a 'Pair' in Microsoft Word and other applications they can use to accelerate writing tasks. The government has a formal agreement with OpenAI over not using any data prompts in future AI training.

What Italy's decision does herald is that nations should begin considering where their line is for AIs. While most of the current generation of large language models are pre-trained, meaning prompts from humans don't become part of their knowledge base, the next generation may include more capability for continuous finetuning, where information can continually be ingested by these AIs to keep improving their performance.

Specific finetuning is available now for certain AIs, such as OpenAI's GPT3 and AI21's Jurassic, which allows an organisation to finetune the AI to 'weight it' towards delivering better results for their knowledge set or specific goals. 

In government terms, this could mean training an AI on all of Australia's legislation to make it better able to review and write new laws, or on all the public/owned research ona given topic to support policy development processes.

It makes sense for governments to proactively understand the current and projected trajectory of AI (particularly generative AI) and set some policy lines to guide the response if they occur.

This would help industry develop within a safe envelope rather than exploring avenues which governments believe would create problems for society.

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