Fair Access

Summary: To promote justice and due process, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in law should be maintained or regulated to: (1) allow “fair” access for all; (2) establish at least one AI algorithm trained to be objective, neutral, and factually correct to inform and allow adjudicative bodies, individuals, and society to use as a standard or reference model; (3) contain “guard rails” that limit or define the inputs and information that AI may use or consider especially in a legal matter; (4) respect the individual’s privacy rights with selective opt-out options; and (5) be accountable for the basis of its responses.

AI is currently hot pursued and developed at great expense by private corporations

Private corporation have spent literally billions of dollars to develop the computing platform that allows an AI to “work”.

Why should people have “fair access” to the private property of Corporations.

The assumption is that AI will become so powerful and ubiquitous that people will need access to a neutral functioning AI in their daily lives. AI should be accessible to people, perhaps as a kind of regulated utility.

AI is Trained on Text Gathered From the Public Internet

AI would not exist without the text and other materials that it was trained on.

While corporations have fair use and other arguments for using the text and other materials gathered from public sources as part of a greater compendium, there has never been an equivalent situation where the combination of public materials into an organized powerful structure has ever changed the basic power dynamics of society.

While there are valid arguments that the creators of those materials should be compensated for the AI’s use of their creations, those arguments are better addressed elsewhere.

A Public Bad, The Opposite of a Public Good.

In economics, a “public good” is a product that one individual can consume without reducing its availability to others and from which no one is excluded. They can be used by anyone and everyone without diminishing the availability of the good or service for others. Examples include law enforcement and national defense. There is a free ryder problem in that people can over-consume a public good (like over-fishing) without bearing the full price.

A “public bad” is the opposite of a public good. A public bad has negative effects that hurt others without the bad actor paying the cost of the harm. Air Pollution, the public health failures like epidemics, and other social costs are examples.

Ironically, if AI is concentrated in the power of corporations to maximize their profits, then AI will take the benefit of human culture in its texts, arts, and expressions, and then use those cultural artifacts (and human vulnerabilities) for the purposes of its profits.

However, if AI is fostered, trained, and directed to assist humans to achieve their values, then AI could possibly open a new era of abundance, human progress, invention, and problem solving.

History teaches us that AI will not naturally serve the best interests of humans in general. The billions of dollars being invested in AI indicate that the shrewdest wealthiest investors also believe that AI will provide outsized profits.

Fair Access

AI should be accessible to people, perhaps as a kind of regulated utility.

The assumption is that AI will become so powerful and ubiquitous that people will need access to a neutral functioning AI in their daily lives.

The goal of “Fair Access” is that Obviously “fair” is a relative term. “Access” is broad and undefined. But the idea of requiring fair access to AI is a human value that people should demand from the beginning.