The White House and G7 issue groundbreaking mandates to regulate A.I.

The complete fact sheet of the White House's Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence can be found at this link.

Coincidentally, the leading industrial countries comprising the Group of 7 (aka G7) agreed only a day earlier on a code of conduct for companies under their individual jurisdictions to follow regarding the development and implementation of A.I.

Among the G7 leaders is President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, who welcomed the G7 International Guiding Principles and the voluntary Code of Conduct, stating that it reflects the "EU values to promote trustworthy AI".

It should be noted that the President Biden's EO only applies to the United States. Moreover, an Executive Order is not as permanent as an actual law ratified by the U.S. Congress. In fact, the next U.S. President may rescind this EO or modify it with a new one during their administration.

In addition, the G7's code of conduct is voluntary. Although G7 leaders like the aforementioned President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen may urge companies to practice ethical development and applications of A.I., the actual enforcement of the code of conduct is unclear.

Though to be fair, the EU established the AI Act that addressed the privacy and safety concerns on the use of AI within their territories. An example of this is the French government raiding Nvidia offices due to suspicion of anti-competitive practices related to the sale of artificial intelligence chips.

The development and use of artificial intelligence systems took a sharp increase by the later months of 2022. ChatGPT saw 1 million users during its initial launch, which ballooned to over 100 million by January 2023. This despite serious questions of whether the datasets it was trained on were exploiting private and proprietary content without consent or compensation.

AI-powered image generators like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, and others also saw a surge of popularity. However, the datasets being used were similarly questioned, particularly with imagery that may be violating people's privacy and exploiting children.

The entertainment and gaming industries have also been subjected to the scrutiny of abusing A.I. Just recently, Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro were under fire for the use of AI images in their Dungeons & Dragons product, Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants. Plus, the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes brought public awareness of the AI situation in Hollywood.

Will this new development of AI mandates lead to a new and clearer A.I. landscape? Given the guidelines under the U.S. EO, will companies that have jumped head first into the AI bandwagon blink from the potential costs of ensuring privacy and safety, as well as worker protection being on the forefront?