Tara K. Giunta is a Partner in the Litigation Practice at Paul Hastings LLP and Lex Suvanto is CEO at Edelman Smithfield.
AI is rightly seen as a transformative tool with the potential to change every aspect of our lives: how we live, how we work, how we create, how we communicate, how we learn. The potential applications are dizzying in their scope, and companies are scrambling to determine how they can participate in the AI revolution, including by adopting AI tools to enable more efficient operations and greater innovation and performance.
While transformative, AI also creates new areas of legal, regulatory, and financial risk, as illustrated by a growing list of alarming real-world examples. For instance, a New York City chatbot provided illegal advice to small businesses suggesting it was legal to fire workers for complaining about sexual harassment. In another case, a healthcare prediction algorithm used by hospitals and insurance companies across the U.S. to identify patients in need of “high-risk care management” programs was discovered to be far less likely to identify Black patients. In yet another case, an online real estate marketplace was forced to write off over $300 million and slash its workforce due to an algorithmic home-buying error driven by AI. Notably, a recent survey of annual reports of Fortune 500 companies showed that 281 companies now flag AI as a possible risk factor, a 473.5% increase from the prior year.[1]
We live in polarising times. The current political and cultural environment is arguably the most heated and controversial in decades. One of the most prominent victims of our era: the truth. As Mark Twain famously said; “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Political election campaigns, in particular, are riddled with misleading statements, half-truths and outright lies. Our fragmented media ecosystem and the pervasive influence of social media make it easier than ever to distribute falsehoods to a vast audience near-instantaneously, compromising the integrity of political elections.