Alicia Solow-Niederman
George Washington University Law School
Beyond the Supply Chain: Artificial Intelligence’s Demand Side
Abstract
AI governance underscores the AI “supply chain” and the “many hands” involved in the production of AI systems. Even when it addresses downstream risks, the focus remains on AI's producers. Although invaluable and important, this production-centered approach risks overlooking what happens when real people use AI tools. This paper identifies and theorizes AI governance’s missing half, which I call the “demand side.” The demand side begins after deployment of an AI model and refers to the distinct, emergent challenges that occur as people engage with AI tools over time. Focusing on information privacy as a concrete example, I analyze human interactions on the demand side and identify three types of challenges that arise in, out of, and via generative AI systems. This paper's demand-side framework and associated typology applies to a range of values and policy issues, from privacy, to bias, to transparency, and beyond. Unless we account for the contextual ways that humans interact with AI systems on the ground, our regulatory interventions will remain incomplete at best and pernicious at worst. The demand side offers a way forward.
About
Professor Solow-Niederman’s scholarship sits at the intersection of law and technology. Her research focuses on how to regulate emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, in a way that reckons with social, economic, and political power. With an emphasis on algorithmic accountability, data governance, and information privacy, Professor Solow-Niederman explores how digital technologies can both challenge longstanding regulatory approaches and expose underlying legal values.
Professor Solow-Niederman’s work has been published or is forthcoming in the Harvard Journal on Law & Technology, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, among other law reviews and peer-reviewed journals. Her piece on data breaches was selected as a winner of the 2017 Yale Law Journal Student Essay Competition. Professor Solow-Niederman is a member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) Advisory Board. She is also a faculty affiliate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and a visiting fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project, where she has worked with the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic on a series of FOIA requests concerning state government use of AI.