Publications: Hodan Omaar

As the Biden administration seeks to increase the responsible use of AI in the federal government, it will need to find ways to streamline contracting for AI services, especially for startups not familiar with all the red tape associated with government procurement. One step the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) should take is developing voluntary standard terms for AI contracts to make procurement more efficient and expand federal contract access to a diverse and large pool of vendors, ensuring agencies can access the best systems.

Some concerns are legitimate, but others are not. Some require immediate regulatory responses, but many do not. And a few require regulations addressing AI specifically, but most do not.

The artificial intelligence market in Canada is still in its early stages but is growing rapidly and becoming increasingly competitive. At this juncture, there is no clear evidence of market failure, substantial barriers to entry, or exclusionary practices that would necessitate intervention.

OMB should support the development of voluntary standard terms for AI contracts to make procurement more efficient and expand access to federal contracts to as diverse and large a pool of vendors as possible so federal agencies can access the best systems.

This legislation lays out a proactive agenda to foster responsible AI development and deployment in the United States.

A landmark ruling in 2015 made it harder for artists and record labels to determine where permissible influence and interpolation become impermissible appropriation and plagiarism. Congress should make things more consistent, accurate, and fair by directing the Copyright Office to launch a competition for the private sector to come up with an AI-enabled tool to compare how similar a musical composition or recording is to existing copyright-protected works.

California's new AI bill stands to seriously hinder the development of state-of-the-art systems in the state, where much of the frontier AI development in the U.S. is taking place. And since California often sets the tone for action in other states, this bill risks setting a precedent for a fragmented regulatory landscape for AI safety across the country.

Cloaking narratives about existential risks of AI in apocalyptic religious language only serves to prevent good-faith efforts to address potential risk scenarios.

While the Artificial Intelligence Research, Innovation, and Accountability (AIRIA) Act strikes the balance between innovation and accountability better than other AI policy proposals, it puts the horse before the cart, requiring the Commerce Department to come up with technical solutions to complex, nontechnical problems that haven’t been fully defined yet.

The decision by so many governments, especially the United States, to legitimize the belief that AI presents an existential risk that governments must address will seriously undermine efforts to rapidly develop and adopt the technology for beneficial purposes.