President Joe Biden's new executive order on artificial intelligence is a first step for the federal government to provide guardrails for the technology but may lack force without action from Congress, industry leaders and analysts said.
Biden announced an executive order Monday addressing several aspects of the technology, including guidance for managing job loss, establishing tools for identifying AI-generated images, and assessing the safety of the relevant algorithms for the public.
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Members of the AI industry have praised the decision but identified several obstacles to its success.
"It's great that the White House has conducted a full interagency process," Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. "But a better way to do this would be to have Congress weigh in and have something the two have come together on."
For example, the order requires that the training of new high-level large language models be reported to the federal government for assessment. Yet government agencies may not have the tools, funding, or know-how to perform such evaluations.
"Without fresh resources provided by Congress, it's not clear that the federal government has the resources to assess the vastly complicated training process or the adequacy of [challenging the model] and other necessary testing," Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, said in a statement.
The order justifies the safety tests under the Defense Production Act, a law that allows the White House to direct private companies to prioritize orders through the government. The White House will have to be "very careful" about implementing those policies concerning the AI assessments, Aram Gavoor, a professor at George Washington University's Trachtenberg School of Public Policy, told the Washington Examiner. The act has certain parameters set, Gavoor said, and the wide application of Biden's order could extend beyond the act and open it up to legal challenges.
Another obstacle relates to the order's directive that the Commerce Department provide federal agencies with guidance on how to ensure that AI-generated images are properly "watermarked" — that is, that they include elements that allow them to be easily identified as AI-generated. "Such tools are not yet effective for detecting AI-generated content," Barrett said. Many researchers have been able to find ways to evade watermarking and even to attach fake watermarks to natural images.
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Congress has AI on its radar, but it has been slow to pass anything. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has been hosting AI insight forums for members to offer them input from experts across the industry. Several bills have been introduced, from proposed task forces to bans on AI accessing nuclear weapons. None of them have moved past the committee level. One presenter at the forums said that Congress was moving too slowly to respond to the imminent threats that the technology presents to the United States.
Vice President Kamala Harris is set Tuesday to visit U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's AI Safety Summit to address several issues discussed in the order.