With dozens of new AI laws and rules now in place across the globe, companies are making countless decisions about potential dangers, adding complexity to using AI responsibly.

Kathy Baxter, principal architect of Salesforce’s responsible AI and tech practice, chatted with us about how her team thinks ahead when it comes to AI responsibility, her role in advising government agencies, and the state of the regulation landscape.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been working in the responsible AI space for years now. What has changed about your work since everybody went crazy for generative AI?

With generative AI, many of the risks are the same as predictive AI, but on steroids. So even higher risks, say bias and toxicity and content creation; there’s some additional new concerns, like hallucinations. So just completely making up information out of thin air. There’s also a real risk of sustainability, because this technology takes much more carbon and water than the traditional, smaller predictive models do. And so as we’re going through and we’re thinking about the products, it gives us an increased risk space that we need to be thinking about.

It’s also changed in that it’s not as straightforward for how you address each of these issues. There are some techniques that we can use that can help, for example, RAG—the retrieval-augmented grounding of our models in our customers’ data—that can really help with hallucinations, but it’s not always sufficient, especially if our customers aren’t doing good data hygiene. If they don’t have complete, accurate, up-to-date data, then the model can end up hallucinating just as much as if you weren’t pointing to the customer’s data. And so thinking about this increased surface area, all the ways that we need to mitigate it. That’s basically how our practice has changed. And with just a whole lot more people on our team covering all of this work now, as well.

Then me, personally, I’ve increasingly worked more and more with our government affairs team to engage with policymakers and governmental groups to think about, “How do we set standards? How do we develop policies to ensure that this technology is safe for everyone?”

Keep reading here.—PK

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LexisNexis is betting that generative AI can save time for business researchers digging deep into the data on its platform—and it’s secured rights deals with several big-name news outlets to further that goal.

The data and analytics company announced the wide rollout of a new tool this week that aims to help corporations collect, summarize, and draw insights from information like financial documents, earnings call transcripts, and news articles. The platform said it’s landed GenAI rights deals with publishers like the Associated Press, Gannett, and McClatchy, which allows for their content to serve as reference fodder for the tool in exchange for a royalty fee from LexisNexis.

Not to be confused with Lexis+ AI—LexisNexis’s new tool for legal research—Nexis+ AI is not actually trained on articles from those news publishers, unlike recent AI deals between tech companies and publishers like News Corp, The Atlantic, the AP, and Axel Springer.

Instead, LexisNexis is tapping “out-of-the-box” models from Anthropic and OpenAI to navigate the content through a method called retrieval-augmented generation, according to Snehit Cherian, CTO of global Nexis Solutions at LexisNexis.

While LexisNexis is perhaps best known for its legal data, the new tool is more aimed at business professionals like corporate strategists or consultants looking at questions like whether to enter a new marketplace or acquire a company, Dani McCormick, VP of product for Nexis Solutions, said.

“We help professionals, broadly, in corporations of all sizes find insight quickly,” McCormick said. “There’s loads of information out there, but you’re lacking time in the day to go through it all, so our job is to get you to the insight, the nugget, the gold super quick.”

Keep reading here.—PK

The Federal Communications Commission has done a lot recently to crack down on the potentially misleading use of artificial intelligence in phone calls and on the airwaves. It’s teed up disclosures for AI-generated content in political ads, banned AI deepfakes in robocalls, and fined an operative behind a robocall campaign that mimicked President Joe Biden’s voice.

Now, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has proposed her agency go another step further: Requiring callers to disclose any use of AI in calls to consumers.

“Bad actors are already using AI technology in robocalls to mislead consumers and misinform the public. That’s why we want to put in place rules that empower consumers to avoid this junk and make informed decisions,” she said in a statement.

If the rest of the commission votes to approve the proposal during its Aug. 7 public meeting, it’ll move ahead with collecting input on the proper definition of AI-generated calls and how disclosures of such calls should work.

Although the rule wouldn’t preclude auto-generated voices—the robot lady that calls from CVS is safe—it would require companies to disclose that they plan to use AI-assisted communications when they obtain consent to contact consumers, and they would have to disclose the use of AI in every call that employs the technology.

Keep reading here.—KG

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