Page 37 - BusinessWest January 8, 2024

A Brave New Year
Legislation Tackles ‘Responsible Use’ of Artificial Intelligence
BY LAUREN C. OSTBERG, ESQ. AND MICHAEL MCANDREW, ESQ.
Artificial intelligence — specifically, natural-language chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard, and Watson — have been making head- lines over the past year, whether it’s college writing teachers’ attempts to avoid reading machine-generated essays, the boardroom drama of OpenAI, the SAG-AFTRA strike, or existential anxiety about the singularity.
On the frivolous end of the spectrum, one of the authors of
this piece used ChatGPT to find celebrity lookalikes for various attorneys at their firm, and learned that ChatGPT defaults to the assumption that, irrespective of race or gender or facial features, most people (including Lauren Ostberg) look like Ryan Reynolds. On the more serious end, the legislatures of state governments, including those in Massachusetts and Connecticut, have labored over bills that will harness, regulate, and investigate the power of AI.
In Massachusetts, for example, the Legislature is considering two bills, one (H.1873) “To Prevent Dystopian Work Environments,” and another (S.31) titled “An Act Drafted with the Help of ChatGPT to Regulate Generate Artificial Intelligence Models Like ChatGPT.” The former would require employers using any automatic decision- making system to disclose the use of such systems to their employ- ees, and give employees the opportunity to review and correct the worker data on which those systems relied. The latter, sponsored by Hampden County’s state Sen. Adam Gomez, aims to regulate newly spawned AI models.
While the use of AI to draft S.31 is, in its own right, an interest- ing real-world application of AI, the use of AI in this way is not the only important part of S.31, which proposes a regulatory regime whereby “large-scale generative artificial intelligence models” are
required to register with the attorney general. In doing so, AI com- panies would be required to disclose detailed information to the attorney general, including “a description of the large-scale genera- tive artificial intelligence model, including its capacity, training data, intended use, design process, and methodologies.”
In addition to requiring the registration of AI companies, S.31 (if passed) would also require AI companies to implement standards to prevent plagiarism and protect information of individually iden- tifiable information used as part of the training data. AI companies must “obtain informed consent” before using the data of individuals. To ensure compliance, the bill gives the AG enforcement powers and grants it the authority to propound regulations that are consis- tent with the bill.
While S.31 provides robust protections against using data gar- nered from citizens of the Commonwealth in programming AI mod- els, it may fail because of the amount of disclosure required from AI companies. As part of a new and fast-moving field, AI companies may be hesitant to disclose their processes, as is required by S.31.
Though commendable in its effort to protect creators and citizens, S.31 may ultimately drive AI-based businesses out of the Common- wealth if they fear that their competitively sensitive AI processes will be disclosed as part of the public registry envisioned by S.31. Howev- er, the structure of the proposed registry of AI businesses is currently unclear; only time will tell how much information will be available to the public. Time will also tell
if S.31 (or H.1873, referenced above) makes it out of commit- tee and into law.
Responsible
Continued on page 39
“The legislatures of state govern- ments, including those in Massachu- setts and Connect- icut, have labored over bills that will harness, regulate, and investigate the power of AI.”
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LAUREN OSTBERG
BULKLEY RICHARDSON
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LUKE GOODRIDGE
“Luke Goodridge has established a reputation as a go-to lawyer in Franklin County and we
are thrilled to welcome him at Bulkley Richardson.”
- Dan Finnegan, Managing Partner
Luke Goodridge has joined Bulkley Richardson as a partner. His practice will focus on estate planning, trust administration and general business law matters.
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