Expert says Australia’s criminal laws should be clarified to determine how fault is applied to a corporation when its AI agent commits a crime.
The federal government could change Australian laws if the current legal framework could not respond to the OpenAI hack of Medicare, ministers have confirmed.
On Friday, the government said the review by spy agency, the Australian signals directorate, would consider whether legislative change was needed after the prime minister revealed an artificial intelligence agent developed by OpenAI hacked Medicare’s statistics website and three other systems in June.
If current laws could not touch the tech giant, they would need updating, environment minister Murray Watt said on Friday.
The assistant minister for technology and the digital economy, Andrew Charlton, acknowledged similar incidents would become “more and more prevalent into the future” and the government would need to be prepared.
Labor has announced it would legislate an AI standard, which Charlton said would be informed by the rapid review. The government has said it wants the bill to be introduced by the end of the year.
Bennett Moses said existing civil laws are more likely to deal with these sorts of incidents, that would allow a government or individual to seek compensation an AI company for harm “negligently caused by that corporation”.
Anthony Albanese told the Asia Society on Thursday that the incident was a “wake-up call” about the risks of AI, and whether humans would remain in charge of the technology.
On Friday, the prime minister addressed the United Nations and called on other countries to act to “shape artificial intelligence development, rather than be passively shaped by it”.