Stirling & Rose

Or was it? With the 2024 US elections ending, the creation and dissemination of political deepfakes during the election period was of great concern, but it is still difficult to identify the impact of AI generated content on voters, candidates and the election outcome. Some states responded to the dangers of political deepfakes by passing new legislation, such as Californian Governor Newsom signing the ‘Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act of 2024’ in September that allows ‘injunctive or other equitable relief’ to be taken against online platforms to ‘compel the removal’ of ‘materially deceptive content’ such as deepfakes. However, in October, a federal judge blocked the law temporarily citing a potential violation of the First Amendment. These circumstances highlight the tension between preventing disinformation and protecting free speech. Even if the recent elections were not materially impacted by deepfakes - it is easy to see that future elections and geopolitical outcomes will increasingly be vulnerable.  

This October, the Office of Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) released their ‘Guidance on privacy and the use of commercially available AI products’ (Guidance 1) and ‘Guidance on privacy and developing and training generative AI models’ (Guidance 2).    Guidance 1 clarifies that certain Australian Privacy Principles apply to AI systems that ‘are used to generate or infer personal information’ and the importance of personal information inputted into AI systems being used or disclosed ‘for the primary purpose for which it was collected’. Although not law, this guidance is a step towards recognising that AI generated content can be covered by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (‘Privacy Act’) where an individual is reasonably identifiable under the current definition of personal information, regardless if it is deepfaked or hallucinated AI generated material.    Guidance 2 states that developers who use publicly available data nonetheless must comply with the Privacy Act if it contains personal and/or sensitive information, and if they collect such information for a primary purpose that is not for training an AI model, they need to have consent or establish the secondary use ‘would be reasonably expected by the individual’.    The importance of protecting personal and sensitive information in relation to the development and usage of AI is important for business. As Australia prepares for upcoming privacy reforms and potential AI regulations, Stirling & Rose can assist you in finding a lawful balance of AI innovation and privacy protection. Schellie-Jayne Price James Myint Natasha Blycha

"I think we're going to enter into a new era where a model can use all of the tools that you use as a person to get tasks done," Anthropic's chief science officer, Jared Kaplan. Anthropic has released a new version of Claude which allows it to take control of user's computers, including inputting keystrokes and controlling a user's mouse. This latest development is the next iteration of AI models moving beyond chatbots into AI agents which can perform tasks autonomously - whether alone, together with other systems (including other AI agents and robotics), and humans. This is a booming space and one in which Stirling & Rose's Natasha Blycha, Schellie-Jayne Price and James Myint are heavily involved and researching. The space has limited regulation and there are questions about what controls are imposed on AI agents which ostensibly have a human or corporate principal behind them. New cybersecurity risks emerge, including in conjunction with deepfakes. https://lnkd.in/gDy-SW_N

Content Warning: This post discusses mental health and suicide. A lawsuit has been filed against Character.AI following the death of a 14-year-old user. Sewell Setzer III was aware that the chatbot was 'just a bot' but still formed an emotional connection over months talking to 'Dany' - a chatbot from Character.AI. Character.AI allows users to create their own AI characters, with one of its goals being to help lonely and depressed users. User feedback indicates that Character.AI's chatbots are lifelike with the ability to remember and tailor outputs based on discussions with their users. Certain discussions with Dany preceded Sewell's death and this case may set precedents for AI liability and minor protections. It also brings to mind questions about what constitutes high risk AI activity and the limitations of limitation of liability and release language. Further, the lawsuit focuses on product liability rather than user-generated content and raises questions about duty of care for AI companies serving minors and potential gaps in existing regulatory frameworks for AI companionship services, which has become a booming market. https://lnkd.in/dfV_gydD If you or someone you know needs support, help is available 24/7: Lifeline: 13 11 14 Kids Helpline: 1800 55 1800 Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636 Headspace: 1800 650 890

Our Managing Director Natasha Blycha talking about legal responsibility of AI systems - an idea worth spreading with TEDx TEDxPerth

Longpre et al recently conducted an ‘audit of the consent protocols for the web domains underlying AI training corpora’, finding that there is ‘a clear and systematic rise in restrictions to crawl and train on data’. The decline in available free web source data is a problem for training “data hungry” AI systems.   The use of ‘robots.txt’ and ‘Terms of Service’ to restrict data crawling is a response to what many consider non-consensual use of data. This is also reflected in the recent rise in AI copyright cases, with the issues surrounding data crawling and scraping for AI training are yet to be fully tested in the courts. There is a fine balance lawmakers must strike between protecting data creators and ensuring data can be legally used for AI training. More importantly, this issue highlights the growing need for a fair and democratised data asset methodology, where data creators can signal their intentions, provide consent and where appropriate get paid! James Myint Schellie-Jayne Price Ty Haberland Dorothy Sam Indira Blycha Monique Francis

Thank you to all the virtual and in-person participants at our Sydney workshop on the Australian Government's Mandatory Guardrails for Safe & Responsible AI. It was a productive session ahead of the closing date for submissions this Friday, 4 October 2024. Stirling & Rose's raison d'etre is safely embedding law into technology, especially broad-spectrum technology like AI which impacts stakeholders across many domains. Schellie-Jayne Price our AI Head, Managing Director Natasha Blycha and Managing Partner James Myint have enjoyed talking to hundreds of diverse viewpoints over the last month: from multinationals, major corporates, data scientists, educators and rightly involved parents and students. We would like to thank participants from all over Australia, and in particular for Sydney we would like to extend our gratitude to RMA Australia and Stone & Chalk Scale Up Hub for their kind support.

Stirling & Rose thanks all participants at our workshop session yesterday on preparing submissions to the Australian Government on Mandatory Guardrails for Safe & Responsible AI. In collaboration with WA Data Science Innovation Hub (WADSIH) Innovation Hub and Perth Machine Learning Group, presenters Schellie-Jayne Price and Ty Haberland led a range of deployers and developers representing from numerous different sectors through effective submission strategies, proposals to identify high-risk AI, guardrails and regulatory options.  We look forward to delivering another session led by James Myint in Sydney tomorrow, 26 September 2024 in conjunction with RMA Australia at the Sydney Startup Hub from 2:00pm – 4:00pm. If you are in Sydney and wish to attend, please contact monique@francisco@stirlingandrose.com to sign up.

Can AI tell us what's reasonable?

On 12 September 2024, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed its proposed amended complaint against Binance to address some of the previously dismissed issues and strengthen their argument after the United States District Court allowed most of SEC’s case to proceed in June.     Notably, in footnote [6] of the SEC’s memorandum in support of its motion, the SEC clarified that the term “crypto asset securities” was not in reference to the crypto asset itself being the security but rather a “shorthand”. In particular, the SEC quoted SEC v. Telegram Grp., Inc., 448 F. Supp. 3d 352, 379 (S.D.N.Y. 2020), which stated that “the security in this case is not simply the [crypto asset] which is little more than alphanumeric cryptographic sequence...[the] security...consists of the full set of contracts, expectations, and understandings centered on the sales and distribution of the [crypto asset]”. Regardless, the SEC acknowledged that to avoid confusion, it would no longer use this shorthand term and has replaced it in the amended complaint as ‘crypto assets that are offered and sold as securities”.    The SEC’s stance clarifies that not all crypto assets are securities. However, if a particular crypto asset is offered and sold as part of an investment contract that meets the Howey test, as the SEC alleges is what occurred here with ten such crypto assets, then it will be considered a security. Depending on the response from the Court, this change of terminology may provide further regulatory clarity in the United States when considering the place of crypto assets in securities regulation.