The Open Data Institute has warned fundamental issues – including shortage of high-quality data – could 'threaten' the AI boom.
The ODI’s latest white paper, ‘Building a better future with data and AI’, is based on research carried out by the Institute in the first half of 2024. It identifies significant weaknesses in the UK’s tech infrastructure that threatens the predicted potential gains for people, society, and the economy from the AI boom. It also outlines the ODI’s recommendations for creating diverse, fair data-centric AI.
The research comes as the EU AI Act came into effect as of yesterday (1 August), with Curtis Wilson from Belfast, Staff Data Engineer at the Synopsys Software Integrity Group, warning that the “greatest problem facing AI developers is not regulation, but a lack of trust in AI.”
Based on its research, the ODI is calling for five actions that will allow the UK to benefit from the opportunities presented by AI while mitigating potential harms. These include to: ensuring broad access to high-quality, well-governed public and private sector data to foster a diverse, competitive AI market.
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This is in addition to enforcing data protection and labour rights in the data supply chain; as well as empowering people to have more of a say in the sharing and use of data for AI.
The ODI is also calling for an update on our intellectual property regime to ensure AI models are trained in ways that prioritise trust and empowerment of stakeholders; and finally it is called for an increased transparency around the data used to train high-risk AI models.
Meanwhile, the ODI’s white paper argues that the potential for emerging AI technologies to transform industries such as diagnostics and personalised education shows great promise. Yet significant challenges and risks are attached to widescale adoption, including - in the case of generative AI – reliance on a handful of machine learning datasets that ODI claims research shows a lack of robust governance frameworks.
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"This poses significant risks to both adoption and deployment, as inadequate data governance can lead to biases and unethical practices, undermining the trust and reliability of AI applications in critical areas such as healthcare, finance, and public services.
"These risks are exacerbated by a lack of transparency that is hampering efforts to address biases, remove harmful content, and ensure compliance with legal standards. To provide a clearer picture of how data transparency varies across different types of system providers, the ODI is developing a new 'AI data transparency index.'"
Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Executive Chair & Co-founder of the ODI, said: “If the UK is to benefit from the extraordinary opportunities presented by AI, the government must look beyond the hype and attend to the fundamentals of a robust data ecosystem built on sound governance and ethical foundations. We must build a trustworthy data infrastructure for AI because the feedstock of high-quality AI is high-quality data.
"The UK has the opportunity to build better data governance systems for AI that ensure we are best placed to take advantage of technological innovations and create economic and social value whilst guarding against potential risks.”
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