The Center for Data Innovation has submitted written testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Data Security on crafting policies to increase transparency in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for consumers. In this statement, we offer three considerations policymakers should keep in mind to ensure consumers are protected from harm:
- While policymakers should encourage companies to adopt the NIST risk management framework, they should recognize that it is not a silver bullet for trustworthy AI. There are a variety of technical and procedural controls companies can employ to mitigate harm and policymakers should encourage companies to explore the full gamut of mechanisms to find those most contextually relevant.
- Because increasing AI transparency can make some systems less accurate and effective, policymakers should fund research to better understand this tradeoff and evaluate policies for transparency against the impact on system accuracy.
- Policymakers should hold AI systems to the same standard as human decisions, which are not always transparent.
- Policymakers should direct NIST to support work on content provenance mechanisms, which are techniques that help users establish the origin and source of content (both AI-generated and human-generated), rather than create policies that simply require systems to disclose when output is AI-generated.
