Boosting Innovation while Regulating AI: Overview of 2023 Activities and 2024 Outlook

Regulating artificial intelligence (AI) presents one of the major challenges that governments, industries, and societies-at-large will have to tackle in both the present and the coming years. On one hand, AI will continue to affect every aspect of our lives in the future, which makes the regulation of AI most impactful on how we will interact with AI-powered applications. On the other hand, AI is advancing at unprecedented speed, which makes it challenging to foresee future directions and to align rather stable regulation with dynamic innovation in a reasonable way. As AI improves and diffuses, GPAI Members’ governments are considering the role of regulation to limit potential harms but not to hinder innovation, whether the regulation is legally binding (e.g., EU’s proposed AI Act) or non-binding (e.g., Singapore’s Model Governance Framework, Japanese METI’s AI Governance Framework). To help guide governments in this task, the I&C WG laid out a number of principles and best practices for a private session on AI regulation for the GPAI Summit in November 2021. In 2022, the I&C WG continued to finalize the principles for AI regulation and prepared the categorization of existing regulatory approaches. In 2023, the Regulation Project Advisory Group (Regulation Project) aimed to continue their effort to collect practical examples of how countries, institutions or other organizations support the industry to innovate while complying with AI regulation. Moreover, the Regulation Project aimed to outline concrete regulatory approaches and impact measures. The initial plan for 2023 focused on creating metrics to evaluate the impact of regulation on innovation, mapping regulatory approaches, and developing a library of resources. However, the project faced unique challenges due to the specific global environments, the dynamic nature of the work with evolving regulations, and the need to engage a diverse range of participants. This led the Regulation Project Advisory Group to change gears midway in the year and redirect our path for 2024. Ultimately, the I&C WG aims investigate the various AI regulations procedures deployed world-wide in the context of innovation. Its goal is to devise a collection of tools or practices to measure the impact of such procedures on innovation and commercialization. It will then gather, as best as possible, the value of the proposed frameworks, resources or indicators for the listed regulation procedures. The I&C WG does not work on standards or norms. Moreover, the I&C WG does not intend to propose any recommendation on what the “best” regulation policy is. But we do intend to propose ways to measure the impact of regulation on innovation and commercialization. This does include examples from low- and middle-income countries within the reach of the WGs experts to create a diverse set of practices. The Regulation Project, as well as the I&C WG-at-large, build on work from the OECD and actively looks for integration of OECD results into the GPAI work to ensure consistency and strengthened collaboration.