Future Shock: Generative AI and the International AI Policy and Governance Crisis
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Crisis 5 stakeholders from across industry, academia, government, and civil society, and from around the globe, had made concerted efforts to develop standards, policies, and governance mechanisms to ensure the ethical, responsible, and equitable production and use of AI systems.However, as we then show, despite these ostensibly supportive activities and background conditions, several primary drivers of future shock converged to produce an international AI policy and governance crisis in the wake of the dawning of the GenAI era.Such a crisis, we argue, was marked by the disconnect between the strengthening thrust of public concerns about the hazards posed by the hasty industrial scaling of GenAI and the absence of effectual regulatory mechanisms and needed policy interventions to address such hazards.In painting a broad-stroked picture of this crisis, we underscore two sets of contributing factors.First, there have been factors that have demonstrated the absence of various vital aspects of AI policy and governance capability and execution-and thus the absence of key preconditions for readiness and resilience in managing technological transformation.These include prevalent enforcement gaps in existing digital-and data-related laws (e.g., intellectual property and data protection statutes), a lack of regulatory AI capacity, democratic deficits in the production of standards for trustworthy AI, and widespread evasionary tactics of ethic washing and state-enabled deregulation.Sec…
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In a context of international diplomatic and economic tension, the non-binding nature of soft law raises concerns over its ability to attract stakeholders and encourage their compliance, contributing to concerns of a crisis of global AI governance.
“In a context of international diplomatic and economic tension, however, it is argued that the non-binding nature of soft law raises concerns over its ability to attract stakeholders and encourage their compliance, contributing to concerns of a crisis of global AI governance (Leslie & Perini, 2024).”
From Deepfakes, Democracy, and the Ethics of Synthetic Media: A Synthesis of the SOLARIS Project (2026) · cites this paper as Leslie & Perini, 2024
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- Authors
- Leslie, D., & Perini, A. M.
- Affiliations
- Queen Mary University of London (GB)
- The Alan Turing Institute (GB)
- Venue
- Harvard Data Science Review
- Publisher
- MIT Press
- Published
- 2024-05-31
- Issue
- Special Issue 5
- ISSN
- 2644-2353 (ISSN-L)
- 2688-8513
- OpenAlex
- W4399205591
- Cited by
- 33
- References
- 73
- Citations by year
- 2026: 19 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 3
- FWCI
- 13.67
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Harvard Data Science Review (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/Z505584/1)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Social Sciences › Law › Digitalization, Law, and Regulation
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Law, AI, and Intellectual Property
- Keywords
- generative AI, AI policy, AI governance, future shock, model scaling, industrial scale-up, systemic risk, AI regulation, regulatory capacity, data protection law, intellectual property law, AI misuse, model opacity, emergent capabilities, democratic deficit, computational cost, data centralization
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