An AI safety policy speaker, from an organisation that does policy research (likely someone adjacent to the EA space), talks about:
Stronger regulation for AI beyond human capability
Loss of control
Bans, treaties, and international cooperation
Then, the industry panelist speaks. Someone affiliated to something called the “International Association of Privacy Professionals” (or IAPP), who you never heard of before but apparently have a lot of pull.
They talk about:
High-Risk AI system classification under the EU AI Act (employment, banking) and biometric data processing
The importance of an AI use case inventory
Trackers.
Which AI agents get a risk assessment, and which don’t
Algorithmic bias and hallucinations (and the novel thing called “RAG” that helps legal professionals avoid them...)
Harvey, Legora, Co-counsel and the best tools to start using AI at work.
You’re confused: it’s like each speaker is attending a totally different conference.
For one side, AI risk in its most dangerous form is still unaddressed by existing regulation.
For the other, AI risk is being addressed by “knowing what use case it is and classifying correctly”.
This happened to me recently when I was a panelist at an IAPP event. I talked about the need for technical AI safety literacy among AI governance professionals, resources from institutions like the AI Security Institute and research-grounded AI safety policy.
It was well-received, but I could see how people struggled to follow.
Sadly, I am very aware that AI safety just isn’t mentioned very often in these rooms.
The rooms where the people responsible for legal implementation of “AI Laws”, sit.
They are not necessarily the people most likely to have been exposed to AI safety concepts.
Some may be tech-savvy enough to research “what makes AI safe” and end up reading lesswrong and taking a BlueDot Impact course.
Many others may hear “AI safety” and think it means doing a pen test on ChatGPT before onboarding it. And I don’t blame them: they simply take the upskilling routes available to them right now.
But this means that”AI governance”, as practiced, lands very far from what AI safety thinks it is.
We need more training for the legal implementation side.
I wrote a long form post on why AI Safety Policy Needs to train Legal Practitioners that explains more clearly what the disconnect looks like, and why the “legal implementation” side (not only the policy side) also needs competent practitioners.
You attend an “AI Governance” conference.
An AI safety policy speaker, from an organisation that does policy research (likely someone adjacent to the EA space), talks about:
Stronger regulation for AI beyond human capability
Loss of control
Bans, treaties, and international cooperation
Then, the industry panelist speaks. Someone affiliated to something called the “International Association of Privacy Professionals” (or IAPP), who you never heard of before but apparently have a lot of pull.
They talk about:
High-Risk AI system classification under the EU AI Act (employment, banking) and biometric data processing
The importance of an AI use case inventory
Trackers.
Which AI agents get a risk assessment, and which don’t
Algorithmic bias and hallucinations (and the novel thing called “RAG” that helps legal professionals avoid them...)
Harvey, Legora, Co-counsel and the best tools to start using AI at work.
You’re confused: it’s like each speaker is attending a totally different conference.
This happened to me recently when I was a panelist at an IAPP event. I talked about the need for technical AI safety literacy among AI governance professionals, resources from institutions like the AI Security Institute and research-grounded AI safety policy.
It was well-received, but I could see how people struggled to follow.
Sadly, I am very aware that AI safety just isn’t mentioned very often in these rooms.
The thing is: in corporate AI governance, AI risk largely falls on the shoulders of privacy professionals, with legal and compliance in the murky middle too.
The people assessing AI risk in corporate deployments are often general counsel, product counsel, data protection officers, privacy operations, and compliance teams.
They are not necessarily the people most likely to have been exposed to AI safety concepts.
Some may be tech-savvy enough to research “what makes AI safe” and end up reading lesswrong and taking a BlueDot Impact course.
Many others may hear “AI safety” and think it means doing a pen test on ChatGPT before onboarding it. And I don’t blame them: they simply take the upskilling routes available to them right now.
But this means that”AI governance”, as practiced, lands very far from what AI safety thinks it is.
We need more training for the legal implementation side.
That’s why I’m teaming up with ML4Good to launch the first European Seminar on Frontier AI and Law, aimed precisely at those profiles.
I wrote a long form post on why AI Safety Policy Needs to train Legal Practitioners that explains more clearly what the disconnect looks like, and why the “legal implementation” side (not only the policy side) also needs competent practitioners.