The memo is a very high-level mandate without a lot of needed guidance, according to Avivah Litan, a distinguished vice president analyst with Gartner Research. It’s also disappointing, she noted, that the Biden Administration and Congress have yet to come up with cohesive federal AI legislation that sets the rules and frameworks for risk assessments.
“For now, it’s a confusing maze of US Federal and state rules,” she said. “The agencies need to come up with governance councils, processes and a common technology stack that enforces use-case driven policies and ‘democratic values.’ It’s one thing to say, ‘Go use AI responsibly’ — it’s another to say what to use it for, how to use it, and which runtime guardrails and continuous out-of-band monitoring, evaluation, and assurances need to be in place.”
Jack Gold, principal analyst with tech industry research firm J. Gold Associates, believes the purpose of the White House memo is primarily to show the Biden Administration isn’t ignoring AI and is trying to not fall behind other nations, such as China and Russia — both of which are deploying it more for a variety of purposes.