Misguided: AI regulation needs a shift in focus
policyreview.info
Is the current regulatory focus on AI misguided? AI-based services are produced in agile production environments that are decades in the making and concentrated in the hands of a few companies. This article illustrates how AI is only the latest output of these production environments, gives an overview of the socio-technical as well as political-economic concerns these environments raise, and argues why they may be a better target for policy and regulatory interventions.

Our current policy and research focus on artificial intelligence (AI) needs a paradigmatic shift in order to regulate technology effectively. It is evident that AI-based systems and services grab the attention of policymakers and researchers in light of recent regulatory efforts, like the EU AI Act and subsequent public interest technology initiatives focusing on AI (Züger & Asghari, 2023). While these initiatives have their merits, they end up narrowly focusing efforts on the latest trends in digitalisation. We argue that this approach leaves untouched the engineered environments in which digital services are produced, thereby undermining efforts to regulate AI and to ensure that AI-based services serve the public interest. Even when policymakers consider how digital services are produced, they assume that AI is captured by a few cloud companies (Cobbe, 2024; Vipra & West, 2023), when, in fact, AI is a product of these environments. If policymakers fail to recognise and tackle issues stemming from AI’s production environments, their focus on AI may be misguided. Accordingly, we argue that policy and research should shift their regulatory focus from AI to its production environments.