OECD draft Council Recommendation of AI is now final

WPF is pleased to announce that after more than two years of work, the OECD draft Council Recommendation on Artificial intelligence is now final. The draft now becomes the OECD Guidelines on AI. The final meeting took place in Paris, Friday 15 March at OECD headquarters, where the CDEP Committee adopted the Guidelines at approximately 4 pm.

The Recommendation will be formally adopted at the OECD Council Meeting on 22-23 May 2019. This is a significant moment as the OECD AI Guidelines are the first international, consensus, legal instrument on AI.

WPF thanks the OECD Secretary for inviting us to represent civil society as an AI Expert Group delegate, and thanks Secretariat Carblanc for inviting us to be a delegate at the CDEP meetings. WPF also thanks CSISAC and the Public Voice for facilitating our attendance at CDEP.

The AI Expert Group is an extraordinary group of global experts, and WPF is deeply honored to have worked with each of the delegates through this process. Thanks also to the government participants who participated so thoughtfully.

And finally, WPF expresses our deep gratitude to the OECD — Director Wyckoff, Chair and Vice Minister Min, and Secretariat Carblanc have demonstrated extraordinary leadership and skill in bringing these recommendations to a successful conclusion, as have the entire OECD team working on the project, especially the DEP AI team.

Only time will reveal if the OECD AI Guidelines achieve the same level of dissemination and impact as the OECD Guidelines on Privacy. But the opportunity now exists. The final iteration of the guidelines as passed today is strong. The guidelines incorporate core values and principles which will work to ensure that fairness, accountability, transparency and other important protections are included as AI is utilized across the globe. The OECD AI Guidelines also incorporate strong human rights protections, privacy, and inclusivity. WPF is honored to have participated in this process, and we will continue our work in this import area.

Pam Dixon

Executive Director, WPF

Paris, France

Posted March 15, 2019 in AI, News, Press, and Media, OECD, Privacy News

New Report: Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new WPF report, “Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools.” This report sets out a definition of AI governance tools, documents why and how these tools are critically important for trustworthy AI, and where these tools are around the world. The report also documents problems in some AI governance tools themselves, and suggests pathways to improve AI governance tools and create an evaluative environment to measure their effectiveness. AI systems should not be deployed without simultaneously evaluating the potential adverse impacts of such systems and mitigating their risks, and most of the world agrees about the need to take precautions against the threats posed. The specific tools and techniques that exist to evaluate and measure AI systems for their inclusiveness, fairness, explainability, privacy, safety and other trustworthiness issues — called in the report collectively AI governance tools – can improve such issues. While some AI governance tools provide reassurance to the public and to regulators, the tools too often lack meaningful oversight and quality assessments. Incomplete or ineffective AI governance tools can create a false sense of confidence, cause unintended problems, and generally undermine the promise of AI systems. The report contains rich background details, use cases, potential solutions to the problems discussed in the report, and a global index of AI Governance Tools.
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Report: From the Filing Cabinet to the Cloud: Updating the Privacy Act of 1974

This comprehensive report and proposed bill text is focused on the Privacy Act of 1974, an important and early Federal privacy law that applies to the government sector and some contractors. The Privacy Act was written for the 1970s information era -- an era that was characterized by the use of mainframe computers and filing cabinets. Today's digital information era looks much different than the '70s: smart phones are smarter than the old mainframes, and documents are now routinely digitized and stored and perhaps even analyzed in the cloud, among many other changes. The report focuses on why the Privacy Act needs an update that will bring it into this century, and how that could look and work. This work was written by Robert Gellman, and informed by a two-year multi-stakeholder process.