Governments are struggling to write rules for a technology that is moving faster than they can legislate, and New Zealand is no exception.
Recently, Malaysia dealt with its own major security breach. The South China Morning Post reports a commercial AI election manipulation platform was targeting the 222 parliamentary constituencies in the nation, using millions of voting records, fake social media accounts, and a fake news site targeting opposition politicians.
It took electoral and census data to profile voters, then had fake accounts to inflate support.
As Malaysia trains its parliamentarians to use AI and deals with a reported AI-driven election manipulation scheme, New Zealand is taking a lighter approach.
Jasmine Begum, Microsoft’s Asia regional director for legal and government affairs, told interest.co.nz about Microsoft's AI for policymakers’ initiative.
“A lot of our policy makers were trained for the analog world, and digital policy is a very different take from the analog policy,” Begum said.
Microsoft partnered with Parliament to help parliamentary staff and parliamentarians better use AI. That included for staffers and in the civil service, pulling historical information, looking back at debates and going through the Hansard faster.
"The second part... just last year, we were able to partner with the Malaysian Parliament to bring that skill for the parliamentarian, as well as the parliamentary staff.”
Begum said the benefits were increased productivity and being able to use AI responsibly.
"Time resources... productivity is a big part of this, but also people are getting to see how it [is] applied. And in the real world, application becomes more apparent.
“How do you use artificial intelligence to prepare better, looking at previous presentations, arguments presented in Parliament… being able to pull real time information and to be able to have an effective debate in Parliament.”
And while Begum said it was not normal for different ministries to come together to solve a problem, it helped with cross engagement between ministries.
Regulation
On AI regulation, Begum said there needed to be an agile policy environment.
“The speed at which technology is being adopted and being diffused, the regulators and policymakers are still trying to catch up."
“We cannot have a framework that's traditional in policy making, that you have five year master plans or very rigid scaffolding - you need to be able to have an agile policy making environment that allows you to shift with the change that's happening. That is where I think the biggest struggle is, we are still not 100% into the agile policy making mode.”
“Unfortunately, the speed of technology and adoption and diffusion is beyond the speed of light, and that's where I think governments are trying to balance between what they know, what they are trying to solve for and without impeding innovation," Begum said.
"I think that's the sweet spot that we need to look at.”
Anwar Abdul Majeed, head of Sunway University’s Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, said AI knowledge was rapidly evolving.
In terms of the regulatory framework, he said the next five to 10 years would be particularly important when it comes to artificial general intelligence.
It was also important for citizens to understand AI for sovereign reasons, with the biggest challenge in AI computing power.
“If you want to use Chat GPT, it's almost accessible for everyone… But let's say you want to do some serious work research-related, you want to deploy it, so compute power is quite an issue," he said.
"It requires a substantial amount of resources."
He thought SMEs were struggling with this and the resources and investment needed.
"Not many are willing to spend to move needle."
They also needed talent.
"It's a chicken and egg at the moment."
New Zealand’s regulatory landscape
Asked if New Zealand had regulation of AI, Auckland University senior law lecturer Joshua Yuvaraj said, “the short answer is not really”.
“The Government has released an AI policy. A lot of people would say that it's quite a light touch approach to AI regulation.”
Yuvaraj said he thinks of AI regulation via three schools of thought:
AI neutral: “Which is where laws we currently have are fine - we don't need to change criminal law, privacy law, or any other type of law, we can deal with the implications of AI through the laws we currently have.”
AI restrictive: Which says AI tools bring significant potential threats, and they can be manipulated and used in really bad ways. And so the regulation needs to be quite heavy-handed and quite intensive.”
AI permissive: “Which is to say, okay, AI tools will turbocharge productivity; they will benefit society, and so we need to remove any regulatory barriers or as many regulatory barriers as possible to allow us as society to reap the benefits.”
He said his sense was that New Zealand was “probably closer towards the AI permissive part, although we tend to be looking to the rest of the world for guidance…”
On data sovereignty, he said the contemporary phrase is “data is the new oil, data is the new gold.”
“A recurring concern is when information is processed online in any format, it becomes a risk factor, and we've seen in numerous occasions over the last few years what happens when large, well-resourced companies are compromised in their security, and the information is hacked and released to the dark web to be used by by criminals.”
On the regulatory frameworks of Malaysia and Singapore, Yuvaraj said they may not “necessarily adhere to all the principles of liberal democracy that we may otherwise deal with.”
“Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, you know, and Singapore, many would say, is a… semi-authoritarian state, albeit they would say that they are a democratic state.
“There's nothing pejorative there… but the regulatory framework necessarily works easier in those types of context if it's top down, right?
“But if you've got a very avid constitutional system where people are, at least in theory, given a big voice and there's a focus on citizens assemblies and things like that… regulation is going to look different.”
*This story was produced with funding help from the Asia New Zealand Foundation.
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