SDOs fail to regulate AI.

Hadrien Pouget, “What will the role of standards be in AI governance?,” Ada Lovelace Institute, 04-05-2023, https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/blog/role-of-standards-in-ai-governance/

As already mentioned, the SDOs’ industry-led model of standard-setting works well when issues are simple and relatively technical. Designing booster seats has an important impact on children’s safety, but the relevant measures, tests and mitigation methods are well understood.

As standard-setters tackle more complex social issues, it is unclear that the industry-led model carries the right incentives, understanding or legitimacy required to make the necessary value judgements. This is the case of a technology like AI, where both the technology and the harms it can cause are so complex that it becomes difficult to separate value judgements from technical details.

For instance, the EU’s request for AI standards to CEN and CENELEC is rife with examples of grey areas. Is the ‘representativeness’ of a dataset simply a mathematical property, a legal issue or a moral question? If it is all three, then how can these notions be aligned? Similar questions can be asked about the ‘robustness’ of a model: how thoroughly should a system be tested and which possible situations should be prioritised? The same applies to notions such as ‘accuracy’, ‘transparency’ and many others in the request. The ISO’s standard-setting work programme presents similar issues.

This raises the question of how SDOs’ decisions can be made more legitimate. Government involvement or oversight is likely to suffer from lack of expertise on both the technical front and the interests of specific social groups, given the technical complexity and dizzying array of potential applications. Many SDOs have mechanisms for including a wide range of stakeholders for exactly this reason, from offering full memberships to enabling observer roles, and governments can and do incentivise these forms of engagement.10

However, participation is not without friction. SDOs have non-negligible membership fees and application procedures and their work is relatively opaque to outsiders. Current drafts are not usually publicly available and completed standards are paywalled, costing hundreds of pounds to access (not to mention that they will refer to other standards, which are also paywalled). Working on standards requires finding people with the right technical expertise, and these are usually already working in industry. All of this can lead to confusion about where the best point of entry is for newcomers lacking insider knowledge. It can be difficult to judge where or when to engage, whether it is worth engaging, which decisions matter and what the fruits of that engagement could be.