Privacy & Information Security Law Blog

The Centre for Information Policy Leadership (“CIPL”) at Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP recently published the first report in its project on Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) and Data Protection: Delivering Sustainable AI Accountability in Practice.

The report, entitled “Artificial Intelligence and Data Protection in Tension,” aims to describe in clear, understandable terms:

• what AI is and how it is being used all around us today;
• the role that personal data plays in the development, deployment and oversight of AI; and
• the opportunities and challenges presented by AI to data protection laws and norms.

The report describes AI capabilities and examples of public and private uses of AI applications in society. It also looks closely at various tensions that exist between well-established data protection principles and the requirements of AI technologies.

The report concludes with six general observations:

• Not all AI is the same;
• AI is widely used in society today and is of significant economic and societal value;
• AI requires substantial amounts of data to perform optimally;
• AI requires data to identify and guard against bias;
• The role of human oversight of AI is likely to and will need to change for AI to deliver the greatest benefit to humankind; and
• AI challenges some requirements of data protection law.

The report is a level-setting backdrop for the next phase of CIPL’s AI project – working with data protection officials, industry leaders and others to identify practical ways of addressing challenges and harnessing the opportunities presented by AI and data protection.

After this next phase, CIPL expects to release a second report, Delivering Sustainable AI Accountability in Practice, which will address some of the critical tools that companies and organizations are starting to develop and implement to promote accountability for their use of AI within existing legal and ethical frameworks, as well as reasonable interpretations of existing principles and laws that regulators can employ to achieve efficient, effective privacy protection in the AI context. The report will also touch on considerations for the developing data protection laws cognizant of AI and other innovative technologies.

To read the first report in detail and to learn more about the observations detailed above, please see the full report.