Artificial Intelligence (Regulation) Bill [HL]

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd March 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Holmes of Richmond]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my technology interests as adviser to Boston Ltd. I thank all noble Lords who have signed up to speak; I eagerly anticipate all their contributions and, indeed, hearing from my noble friend the Minister. I also thank all the organisations that got in contact with me and other noble Lords for their briefings, as well as those that took time to meet me ahead of this Second Reading debate. Noble Lords and others who would like to follow this on social media can use #AIBill #AIFutures.

If we are to secure the opportunities and control the challenges of artificial intelligence, it is time to legislate and to lead. We need something that is principles-based and outcomes-focused, with input transparent, permissioned and wherever applicable paid for and understood.

There are at last three reasons why we should legislate on this: social, democratic and economic. On reason one, the social reason, some of the greatest benefits we could secure from AI come in this space, including truly personalised education for all, and healthcare. We saw only yesterday the exciting early results from the NHS Grampian breast-screening AI programme. Then there is mobility and net zero sustainability.

Reason two is about our democracy and jurisdiction. With 40% of the world’s democracies going to the polls this year, with deepfakes, cheap fakes, misinformation and disinformation, we are in a high-threat environment for our democracy. As our 2020 Democracy and Digital Technologies Select Committee report put it, with a proliferation of misinformation and disinformation, trust will evaporate and, without trust, democracy as we know it will simply disappear.

On our jurisdiction and system of law, the UK has a unique opportunity at this moment in time. We do not have to fear being in the first mover spotlight—the EU has taken that with its Act, in all its 892 pages. The US has had the executive order but is still yet to commit fully to this phase. The UK, with our common-law tradition, respected right around the world, has such an opportunity to legislate in a way that will be adaptive, versatile and able to develop through precedent and case law.

On reason three, our economy, PwC’s AI tracker says that by 2030, there will be a 14% increase in global GDP worth $15.7 trillion. The UK must act to ensure our share of that AI boom. To take just one technology, the chatbot global market grew tenfold in just four years. The Alan Turing Institute report on AI in the public sector, which came out just this week, says that 84% of government services could benefit from AI automation in over 200 different services. Regulated markets perform better. Right-sized regulation is good for innovation and good for inward investment.

Those are the three reasons. What about three individual impacts of AI right now? What if we find ourselves on the wrong end of an AI decision in a recruitment shortlisting, the wrong end of an AI decision in being turned down for a loan, or, even worse, the wrong end of an AI decision when awaiting a liver transplant? All these are illustrations of AI impacting individuals, often when they would not even know that AI was involved. We need to put paid to the myth, the false dichotomy, that you must have heavy, rules-based regulation or a free hand—that we have to pay tribute to the cry of the frontierists in every epoque: “Don’t fence me in”. Right-sized regulation is good socially, democratically and economically. Here is the thing: AI is to human intellect what steam was to human strength. You get the picture. Steam literally changed time. It is our time to act, and that is why I bring this Bill to your Lordships’ House today.

In constructing the Bill, I have sought to consult widely, to be very cognisant of the Government’s pro-innovation White Paper, of all the great work of BCS, technology, industry, civil society and more. I wanted the Bill to be threaded through with the principles of transparency and trustworthiness; inclusion and innovation; interoperability and international focus; accountability and assurance.

Turning to the clauses, Clause 1 sets up an AI authority. Lest any noble Lord suddenly feels that I am proposing a do-it-all, huge, cumbersome regulator, I am most certainly not. In many ways, it would not be much bigger in scope than what the DSIT unit is proposing: an agile, right-sized regulator, horizontally focused to look across all existing regulators, not least the economic regulators, to assess their competency to address the opportunities and challenges presented by AI and to highlight the gaps. And there are gaps, as rightly identified by the excellent Ada Lovelace Institute report. For example, where do you go if you are on the wrong end of that AI recruitment shortlisting decision? It must have the authority, similarly, to look across all relevant legislation—consumer protection and product safety, to name but two—to assess its competency to address the challenges and opportunities presented by AI.

The AI authority must have at its heart the principles set out in Clause 2: it must be not just the custodian of those principles, but a very lighthouse for them, and it must have an educational function and a pro-innovation purpose. Many of those principles will be very recognisable; they are taken from the Government’s White Paper but put on a statutory footing. If they are good enough to be in the White Paper, we should commit to them, believe in them and know that they will be our greatest guides for the positive path forward, when put in a statutory framework. We must have everything inclusive by design, and with a proportionality thread running through all the principles, so none of them can be deployed in a burdensome way.

Clause 3 concerns sandboxes, so brilliantly developed in the UK in 2016 with the fintech regulatory sandbox. If you want a measure of its success, it is replicated in well over 50 jurisdictions around the world. It enables innovation in a safe, regulated, supported environment: real customers, real market, real innovations, but in a splendid sandbox concept.

Clause 4 sets up the AI responsible officer, to be conceived of not as a person but as a role, to ensure the safe, ethical and unbiased deployment of AI in her or his organisation. It does not have to be burdensome, or a whole person in a start-up; but that function needs to be performed, with reporting requirements under the Companies Act that are well understood by any business. Again, crucially, it must be subject to that proportionality principle.

Clause 5 concerns labelling and IP, which is such a critical part of how we will get this right with AI. Labelling: so that if anybody is subject to a service or a good where AI is in the mix, it will be clearly labelled. AI can be part of the solution to providing this labelling approach. Where IP or third-party data is used, that has to be reported to the AI authority. Again, this can be done efficiently and effectively using the very technology itself. On the critical question of IP, I met with 25 organisations representing tens of thousands of our great creatives: the people that make us laugh, make us smile, challenge us, push us to places we never even knew existed; those who make music, such sweet music, where otherwise there may be silence. It is critical to understand that they want to be part of this AI transformation, but in a consented, negotiated, paid-for manner. As Dan Guthrie, director-general of the Alliance for Intellectual Property, put it, it is extraordinary that businesses together worth trillions take creatives’ IP without consent and without payment, while fiercely defending their own intellectual property. This Bill will change that.

Clause 6 concerns public engagement. For me, this is probably the most important clause in the Bill, because without public engagement, how can we have trustworthiness? People need to be able to ask, “What is in this for me? Why should I care? How is this impacting my life? How can I get involved?” We need to look at innovative ways to consult and engage. A good example, in Taiwan, is the Alignment Assemblies, but there are hundreds of novel approaches. Government consultations should have millions of responses, because this is both desirable and now, with the technology, analysable.

Clause 7 concerns interpretation. At this stage, I have drawn the definitions of AI deliberately broadly. We should certainly debate this, but as set out in Clause 7, much would and should be included in those definitions.

Clause 8 sets out the potential for regulating for offences and fines thereunder, to give teeth to so much of what I have already set out and, rightly, to pay the correct respect to all the devolved nations. So, such regulations would have to go through the Scottish Parliament, Senedd Cymru and the Northern Ireland Assembly.

That brings us to Clause 9, the final clause, which makes this a UK-wide Bill.

So, that is the Bill. We know how to do this. Just last year, the Electronic Trade Documents Act showed that we know how to legislate for the possibilities of these new technologies; and, my word, we know how to innovate in the UK—Turing, Lovelace, Berners-Lee, Demis at DeepMind, and so many more.

If we know how to do this, why are we not legislating? What will we know in, say, 12 months’ time that we do not know now about citizens’ rights, consumer protection, IP rights, being pro-innovation, labelling and the opportunity to transform public engagement? We need to act now, because we know what we need to know—if not now, when? The Bletchley summit last year was a success. Understandably, it focused on safety, but having done that it is imperative that we stand up all the other elements of AI already impacting people’s lives in so many ways, often without their knowledge.

Perhaps the greatest and finest learning from Bletchley is not so much the safety summit but what happened there two generations before, when a diverse team of talent gathered and deployed the technology of their day to defeat the greatest threat to our civilisation. Talent and technology brought forth light in one of the darkest hours of human history. As it was in Bletchley in the 1940s, so it is in the United Kingdom in the 2020s. It is time for human-led, human-in-the-loop, principle-based artificial intelligence. It is time to legislate and to lead; for transparency and trustworthiness, inclusion and innovation, interoperability and international focus, accountability and assurance; for AI developers, deployers and democracy itself; for citizens, creatives and our country—our data, our decisions, #ourAIfutures. That is what this Bill is all about. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this excellent debate. It is pretty clear that the issues are very much with us today and we have what we need to act today. To respond to a question kindly asked by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, in my drafting I am probably allowing “relevant” regulators to do some quite heavy lifting, but what I envisage within that is certainly all the economic regulators, and indeed all regulators who are in a sector where AI is being developed, deployed and in use. Everybody who has taken part in this debate and beyond may benefit from having a comprehensive list of all the regulators across government. Perhaps I could ask that of the Minister. I think it would be illuminating for all of us.

At the autumn FT conference, my noble friend the Minister said that heavy-handed regulation could stifle innovation. Certainly, it could. Heavy-handed regulation would not only stifle innovation but would be a singular failure of that creation of the regulatory process. History tells us that right-size regulation is pro-citizen, pro-consumer and pro-innovation; it drives innovation and inward investment. I was taken by so much of what the Ada Lovelace Institute put in its report. The Government really have given themselves all the eyes and not the hands to act. It reminds me very much of a Yorkshire saying: see all, hear all, do nowt. What is required is for these technologies to be human led, in our human hands, and human in the loop throughout. Right-size regulation, because it is principles-based, is necessarily agile, adaptive and can move as the technology moves. It should be principles-based and outcomes focused, with inputs that are transparent, understood, permissioned and, wherever and whenever applicable, paid for.

My noble friend the Minister has said on many occasions that there will come a time when we will legislate on AI. Let 22 March 2024 be that time. It is time to legislate; it is time to lead.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.