The UK's top Information Commissioner has confirmed that safeguarding consumer rights in the artificial intelligence (AI) era is a top priority but has rejected creating separate regulations specifically for AI.

John Edwards, the UK's sixth Information Commissioner, said the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is "working at pace to apply further clarity on how the law applies to these emergent AI models."

He acknowledged that policymakers had failed to respond quickly enough to social media's impact on data protection—an area the UK is now catching up on with the Online Safety Act 2023. He noted that they would not "miss the boat" regarding data protection and AI. 

Edwards said the growing use of generative AI raises a range of new data privacy questions, speaking during the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) Data Protection Intensive event on 28 February.

The privacy questions they are about to address include how much control we will give the organizations that develop and deploy this technology, when it is lawful to scrape data from the internet to train generative AI models, are people's rights being meaningfully protected when AI models are being built using their information and what safeguards need to be considered by developers and organizations when exploring models.

However, Edwards insisted that there is no need for bespoke AI regulation at this stage. He also stated that we won't discuss AI regulation in a few years because AI will be part of every regulator's domain.

Source: Inforsecurity Magazine