Letter: Task of AI reg­u­la­tion is to get the bal­ance right

While “kill switches” on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence mod­els may seem like a quick fix (“Sil­icon Val­ley in uproar over effect of curbs pro­posed in Cali­for­nian AI safety bill”, Report, June 8), they ulti­mately stifle innov­a­tion and stem from a mis­un­der­stand­ing of the tech­no­logy. Instead, there are bet­ter ways to “bene­fit all of human­ity” with AI more dir­ectly (“OpenAI expands its lob­bying team as poli­cy­makers step up scru­tiny”, Report, June 14). For instance, open­sourcing or freely shar­ing the base­level tech­no­logy would help ensure that first, there is no entrench­ing the digital AI divide across the globe, and second, that tech giants do not mono­pol­ise the AI mar­ket with their pro­priet­ary mod­els.

There’s a reason why Elon Musk was in uproar over the Apple-OpenAI collab­or­a­tion, spot­light­ing data pri­vacy con­cerns, and a reason why top US anti­trust enfor­cer Jonathan Kanter is look­ing into west coast tech giants and mono­poly choke points around AI (“US anti­trust chief to probe con­trol of AI by tech titans”, Report, June 7).

We’ve seen this movie before with the inter­net boom, so let’s not fall prey again, with the trans­form­at­ive cap­ab­il­it­ies of AI that can do so much for us all around the world. AI reg­u­la­tion does indeed have a crit­ical role to play — but let’s get the bal­ance right.

Faisal Al Ban­nai
Adviser to the UAE Pres­id­ent on Stra­tegic Research and Advanced Techno­logy Affairs
Abu Dhabi, UAE