Had a fantastic time last week at the American Conference Institute's AI Law, Ethics, Safety & Compliance conference, hosted by the D.C. Bar!
It's not everyday that you get to hear from such distinguished in-house counsel and technologists as:
- Meng Jia Yang at OpenAI and Ani Gevorkian at Microsoft about how #AI developers are navigating the #EU #AIAct;
- Betsy Greytok at IBM and Zheng Yang at Amazon Web Services (AWS) about the safety, ethical, and compliance considerations of #GenerativeAI;
- Jackie Stanley at Pfizer about what #ResponsibleAI development looks like;
- Corey Salsberg at Novartis about the ethics of training models on copyrighted content; and
- Matthew Frederick at Boeing, Markus Hartmann, J.D., M.B.A. at Mister Car Wash and Julie Myers Wood at Guidepost Solutions about ensuring the protection and confidentiality of customer data in AI operations.
Not to mention learning about #AIwashing, #AIgovernance frameworks, using AI for good and AI #cybersecurity with representatives from the Federal Trade Commission (Aaron Rieke), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (Virginia Rosado Desilets), U.S. Department of Justice (Lisa Miller), EEOC (Ray Peeler), USCIS (Shane Barney), U.S. Department of Homeland Security (Chris Kraft), Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy (Alka Patel, JD, MBA) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (Elham Tabassi).
It was also a pleasure to hear from Kai Zenner, the Head of Office and Digital Policy Adviser for MEP Axel Voss in the European Parliament, who is involved in the political negotiations on the AI Act, #AILiabilityDirective, #ePrivacy Directive and a potential #GDPR revision.
Some takeaways for developers:
- focus on transparency and explainability by design, instead of later needing to shoehorn a square peg (your product) into a round hole (laws and regulations);
- ensure that all personnel involved have the right competency levels, and that they know the internal escalation channels for complex issues; and
- there's no overstating the value of engaging in cross-stakeholder discussions on the #dataprivacy and #dataprotection aspects of customer data acquisition, storage and processing - don't stay siloed (shout out to the Jacquard product and engineering teams)!
It was a pleasure to be surrounded by so many smart, thoughtful and friendly people -- looking forward to the next event!