Rishi Sunak warned of ‘12 risks of AI’ amid calls for urgent regulation

PM urged to set out laws to curtail the risks of artifical intelligence

Rishi Sunak has been warned of the “12 biggest risks of artificial intelligence” by a group of MPs calling for urgent regulation of the technology.

The prime minister has been urged to set out laws to curtail the risks of AI to ensure the public is not "spooked" by the technology.

Parliament’s Science, Innovation and Technology committee said there were “many opportunities” for AI to be beneficial, but warned that the technology also presented “many risks to long-established and cherished rights”.

Overcoming these issues is vital to securing public safety and confidence in its use, as well as positioning the UK “as an AI governance leader”.

With a general election looming next year, the committee has told Mr Sunak to fast-track plans set out in March to give responsibility for AI governance to existing regulators in different sectors.

Without doing so, the UK risks being left behind by the EU and USA who are “pressing ahead” with AI regulation, the committee said.

MPs warned that once a different approach was established, it would be “difficult to deviate from” – as happened with Europe’s data protection law GDPR.

The committee has been looking at the impact of AI on society and the economy, and how it should be regulated since October.

Its interim report found that while AI has been debated since “at least” the 1950s, the launch of platforms such as ChatGPT last November “has sparked a global conversation”.

Rishi Sunak has been urged to bring in AI regulation now (PA Wire)

The 12 challenges outlined in its report are:

• Bias – AI introducing or perpetuating “unacceptable” societal biases
• Privacy – AI allowing people to be identified or sharing personal information
• Misrepresentation – the generation of material by AI that “deliberately misrepresents someone’s behaviour, opinions or character”
• Access to data – AI requires large datasets which are held by few organisations
• Access to compute – powerful AI requires significant computer power, which is limited
• Black box challenge – AI cannot always explain why it produces a particular result, which is an issue for transparency
• Open source challenges – requiring code to be openly available could promote transparency, but allowing it to be proprietary may concentrate market power
• Intellectual property and copyright – some tools use other people’s content
• Liability – if AI is used by third parties to cause harm, policy must establish who bears liability
• Employment – AI will disrupt jobs
• International co-ordination – the development of AI governance frameworks must be international
• Existential challenges – some people think AI is a "major threat" to human life and governance must provide protections for national security

It backed the PM’s plan to give responsibility for AI to existing regulators, but said legislation to impose a duty on regulators “needs to be put to parliament during its next session”.

The committee’s interim report comes just months before Mr Sunak’s global summit on AI, which is being hosted at Bletchley Park, once the top-secret home of Second World War codebreakers.

MPs welcomed the summit, but chair Greg Clark said: “If the government’s ambitions are to be realised and its approach is to go beyond talks, it may well need to move with greater urgency in enacting the legislative powers it says will be needed.”

Mr Clark also told reporters it was important China is invited to Mr Sunak’s summit, adding that it would be beneficial “to have as many voices as possible”.

But he said a smaller group of more trusted nations would need to discuss more sensitive aspects of AI policy.

In March, a white paper outlining a “pro-innovation approach to AI regulation” was presented to parliament by Michelle Donelan, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology.

The document included five principles on AI: safety, security and robustness; fairness; transparency and explainability; accountability and governance; and contestability and redress.

However, Mr Clark said things have moved on and the challenges outlined by SITC are more “concrete”.

“The challenges we’ve laid out are much more concrete and the Government needs to address them,” he added.

The former minister said the “most exciting” applications for AI lie in healthcare, but urged policymakers to “consider the risks to safety”.

In the NHS, AI is currently being used to read X-rays – such as mammograms for breast screening – helping doctors to speed up decision-making and giving them more time to spend with patients, as well as helping medics to diagnose strokes faster.

Elsewhere, researchers are looking into how AI can be used to predict the damage long-term conditions such as diabetes can cause in a patient’s body.

The technology can also be used in drug discovery, giving researchers access to vast amounts of data to speed the process up.

Mr Clark said: “One of the things we were struck by is how medicine is becoming increasingly personalised.

“Quite a lot of drugs have failed clinical trials on a broad-spectrum basis, but now you can identify more closely who they are more suitable for. They can then be deployed straight away to help save lives.”

A government spokesperson said: “AI has enormous potential to change every aspect of our lives, and we owe it to our children and our grandchildren to harness that potential safely and responsibly.”

The spokesperson highlighted the AI summit in November and the government’s regulation white paper, adding that Britain has invested more funding in AI safety “than any other government in the world”.