Bill proposes an AI Authority



Even if there was no AI Bill in the King’s speech, on 22 November a Private Members’ Bill, the Artificial Intelligence (Regulation) Bill, was introduced in the House of Lords to create an AI Authority which would collaborate with relevant regulators to construct regulatory sandboxes for AI. The AI Authority would also consult on and monitor regulatory frameworks, and the Secretary of State could add other functions to the Authority’s remit.

The Bill requires for any business which develops, deploys or uses AI the appointment of an AI Officer with duties:

  1. To ensure the safe, ethical, unbiased and non-discriminatory use of AI
  2. To ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, that data used by the business in any AI technology is unbiased.

Commenting on the proposed bill, a partner at law firm Fieldfisher, Chris Eastham, said: "Last month Rishi Sunak said he did not want to rush regulation in AI which makes this Bill somewhat incongruous with the Government's position. If this proposal goes ahead it will be hugely impactful for those who are developing AI, and for organisations that are currently implementing AI governance regimes this may mean that a rethink is necessary."

The Bill says that ‘AI includes generative AI, meaning deep or large language models able to generate text and other content based on the data on which they were trained.’

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