The Regulatory Project

Project Summary

ADM systems (including AI, foundation models and generative AI) pose ongoing regulatory challenges for Australian governments at every level, and across multiple domains.
2024-2027 is a critical period for the development of regulation of AI. Worldwide, governments are taking concrete steps to adapt existing laws to technological, social and other changes brought about by expanding uses of AI, and to develop new, risk-based regulatory frameworks. At the same time others are moving to provide more governance for AI: for example via the development of technical standards and other frameworks.

The Regulatory Project will contribute to this process, examining fundamental questions that these technologies pose for our regulatory techniques, and engaging research and researchers from across the Centre and the Centre’s partners to inform and respond to regulatory initiatives and quandaries.

Objectives:

• Examine and understand the deployment of ADM systems (including AI), by public and private sector actors and across supply chains, and the effect on fundamental legal concepts, such as natural justice (procedural fairness) as it applies to ADM use by government and firms; responsibility, and accountability, delivering critical new knowledge regarding the changing nature of law and regulation in the AI/ADM space;
• Examine and analyse emerging regulatory and governance mechanisms for the development and deployment of AI, including their interaction with socio-technical context, in order to understand what mechanisms are emerging, whether they work, and (if so) how;
• Translate these understandings across other projects and themes in the centre by collaborating on emerging regulatory implications of research and projects across ADM+S; and
  Provide a hub for ongoing government and policy engagement and to bring legal and regulatory perspectives to research across the Centre.

Project team

• Prof Kimberlee Weatherall
• Prof Christine Parker
• Dr Jake Goldenfein
• Assoc Prof Michael Richardson
• Dr Scarlet Wilcock
• Dr Jose-Miguel Bello y Villarino
• Dr Zofia Bednarz
• Prof Nic Suzor
• Dr Kylie Pappalardo
• Dr Henry Fraser
• Dr Tegan Cohen
• Prof Terry Carney
• Dr Fan Yang

Project partners & collaborators

• Australian Broadcasting Corporation
• AlgorithmWatch
• Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner
• Cornell Tech
• The Consumer Policy Research Centre
• Gradient Institute
• CHOICE
• Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics

Project funding

• Australian Government through the Australian Research Council – ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S)