New AI laws should target data governance, safety to build public confidence: experts | South China Morning Post
Hong Kong has met the AI moment the way a gentleman meets a tidal wave: by convening a working group. Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu says authorities will study new legislation to tackle cyber-enabled crimes — a phrase doing the sort of work 'horseless carriage' managed in 1903, technically accurate, faintly nostalgic, and hopelessly outpaced by the thing it describes. Meanwhile a Department of Justice working group is reviewing whether existing laws adequately address liability issues from AI products, which is roughly the rigour of checking whether your umbrella covers the Pacific. Experts, per the SCMP, want rules on data governance and underlying safety standards, which at least names the two items nobody currently shipping a model has a spare afternoon for.
'Tailored legislation' is the phrase of the piece, and a gorgeous one: bespoke, fitted, taken in at the waist. The wearer, regrettably, is a class of systems retrained, redeployed and quietly renamed on a cadence no legislature has ever matched, which makes the tailoring a subscription service for a body that molts. You cannot cut a suit for something that sheds its measurements every quarter, though you can absolutely bill the fittings. And the stated goal is 'public confidence' — the regulator's version of 'we'll know it when we see it', a feeling, promised, in due course.
The interesting item is the last one: whether existing laws adequately cover liability when an AI product produces something that costs somebody money. That is the question that turns every 'responsible AI' press release into a hostage negotiation — who pays when the model opines, hallucinates, or lends a hand with one of those cyber-enabled crimes? Hong Kong's current answer is a working group, which at least has the decency to be answer-shaped rather than an answer. Pledge the study, study the pledge, and let the legislation ripen in a drawer while the models ship on a schedule that renders the entire exercise a very well-drafted footnote.