As AI becomes more prevalent in our lives the law will need to adapt. However, lawmakers have been struggling to draft a definition that covers exactly what AI is. This may be partly due to AI itself being an imprecise concept, and partly due to the complex technical nature of the field.
As a result, AI is often used as an umbrella term to cover a variety of underlying computing technologies. In this post we seek to examine these underlying technologies that are usually thought of as ‘AI’, and look at how the regulators have so far tried to capture ‘AI’ in words.
The problem of producing a legal definition of AI is perhaps unsurprising, given that even AI experts have differing views on what the technology is.
In fact, the term ‘AI’ is often used to describe a basket of different computing methods, which are used in combination to produce a result but which aren’t necessarily AI by themselves. Five methods that are integral to current AI systems are listed below.
- Machine learning
- Deep learning
- Artificial neural networks
- Search algorithms
- Natural language processing
