Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a part of every day life now. Whether it’s the factories building the things you use every day, ChatGPT-powered solutions, SIRI or Google Assistant on your phone, Alexa on your Amazon devices, or even your Roomba vacuum – AI is here to stay – and it comes with legal considerations. There is now a mad dash to plug AI into software and service solutions far and wide.
This post will give you a high level overview of legal considerations when bringing artificial intelligence software to market.
- Intellectual Property Rights – AI solutions are in the wild west early stage when it comes to intellectual property rights. For example, with ChatGPT powered solutions – content is being scraped far and wide, used for machine learning, and in turn churning out answers, art, and even music. Any prompt you put into a ChatGPT powered AI solution has intellectual property implications as to who owns the data from the prompt and what they can use it for (meaning – don’t put anything confidential into ChatGPT prompts). This will not always be the case, as there are several court cases and legislation that will govern intellectual property rights in artificial intelligence. Prepare accordingly.
- Laws and Regulations – Though in the early stages, several countries and economic areas across the world have enacted regulations around the use of artificial intelligence – either directly, or through other data related regulations such as the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the Illinois Biometric Information Protection Act (BIPA). Wherever you are, have your Product Counsel consider all existing and upcoming legislation that will affect your offerings.
- Data Privacy – Intertwined with laws and regulations, data privacy is a big deal – worldwide. You should make every effort to make sure that you are appropriately following data privacy regulations by getting the appropriate consent from your data subjects, protecting the data you collect, and allowing your data subjects access to their data.
- Fairness – When using AI for decision making processes, the results can be particularly tricky. Many data privacy regulations have a fairness principle – which aim to protect individual data subjects rights. AI is imperfect – and the data set it learns from may teach it to have an implicit bias based on race, gender, or other sensitive personal data. Getting this wrong can lead to civil litigation. It’s important to continuously check how your AI is learning, and double check whether there are biases built in.
- Third Party Vendor Risk – If you are plugging a third party AI solution into your offering, especially if you are in a regulated industry – you should put increased scrutiny into your third party vendor risk assessment of the AI solution. OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) recently had a data breach, and it won’t be the last.
- Risk Allocation – Contractual provisions such as Indemnification, Limitations of Liability, and Insurance Requirements aim to allocate risk. Due to the imperfect and continuously evolving nature of AI, it’s important to work with your product and legal department to appropriately set forth what type of risk allocation your company is willing to accept, and where you draw the line.
Let us Help
This post is by no means a comprehensive list of legal considerations, and provides just a high level overview. There are many more nuances and specifics, and you should have an experienced attorney help you understanding the legal considerations when building an AI solution.
Kader Law can help you through understanding these legal considerations. If you’re interested, feel free to contact us.
This post is not legal advice, and does not establish any attorney client privilege between Law Office of K.S. Kader, PLLC and you, the reader.