National Assembly Delegate of Nghe An Delegation Proposes Principles for Establishing Regulations on Artificial Intelligence

Encouraging the development and application of AI but in the right direction

Speaking at the discussion, Mr. Hoang Minh Hieu - Standing Member of the National Assembly's Law Committee, delegate of Nghe An delegation, said that the regulation on artificial intelligence in the draft Law is very necessary when the application of artificial intelligence is taking place at a very fast pace with many benefits but also many problems.

According to him, regulations on this legal framework must ensure the principle of both encouraging and creating conditions for the development of artificial intelligence, but also have regulations to ensure the development and application of artificial intelligence in the right direction.

On that basis, regarding the current regulations in the draft Law on this content, the delegate from Nghe An found that more specific regulations were needed.

Accordingly, regarding the promotion of artificial intelligence development, the draft Law has classified artificial intelligence systems into 3 types: high risk, high impact and low risk; however, the purpose of this classification has not been clarified.

“We propose to add this risk management principle according to the level of hierarchy,” he said, adding that “it is possible to study to regulate for low-risk systems, just requiring developers and service providers to self-declare compliance with regulations on the construction and development of artificial intelligence systems without applying a pre-audit mechanism to create space for the development of artificial intelligence systems.”

As for high-risk systems, before being deployed, they need to go through an independent inspection system and be approved by a competent authority. In addition, it is necessary to study and supplement regulations on establishing a mechanism to reduce legal liability for developers and suppliers if they have fully complied with the regulations but still have unexpected incidents.

Regarding strengthening the management of artificial intelligence development, the draft Law also needs to be supplemented with a number of provisions to increase transparency and accountability in accordance with the established principles.

Accordingly, it is necessary to study and supplement regulations requiring developers and suppliers of artificial intelligence systems to provide technical documents explaining the operating mechanism of the algorithms of artificial intelligence systems, especially for high-risk systems.

At the same time, it is necessary to stipulate the responsibility of the Government in developing a set of transparency indicators to assess the clarity of the system, for example, the ability to explain the output of an artificial intelligence system to non-technical users.

In addition, privacy is one of the most important issues when applying artificial intelligence systems. However, according to the draft law delegates, there is no detailed mention of data processing in artificial intelligence systems.

“Therefore, there should be regulations requiring developers of artificial intelligence systems to conduct privacy impact assessments before deploying artificial intelligence systems, especially for high-risk systems,” said delegate Hoang Minh Hieu.

Issuing a legal framework on digital assets is necessary

Currently, statistical research reports show that Vietnam ranks second in the world in terms of the percentage of people owning digital assets with about 20 million people, and every year about 120 billion USD in cryptocurrency is transferred into Vietnam.

According to delegate Hoang Minh Hieu, if we do not have a legal framework for this form of ownership, we will miss a very important area in the development of the digital economy.

However, when comparing the regulations on digital assets in the draft Law, he found that it is necessary to continue to improve, especially the need to have a specific classification of digital assets to have different management options such as: Cryptocurrency, representative digital assets, virtual assets in the digital ecosystem... For example, Chinese law completely prohibits transactions on cryptocurrencies but allows transactions of some other digital assets.

According to delegate Hoang Minh Hieu, the draft law still lacks regulations clarifying the responsibilities of digital asset service providers, thereby enhancing the protection of consumer rights. While the experience of other countries shows that this is a very important content.

“For example, European Union law sets out very specific regulations on the responsibilities of digital asset issuers, such as registering their operations; committing to legal responsibility for issued products; digital asset trading and storage platforms must also be licensed to operate and must maintain information security and transparency during transactions,” he cited.

In addition to the above contents, recognizing an important law project, expected to create a legal framework to implement the goal of digital transformation in our country, Mr. Hoang Minh Hieu - suggested that the drafting agency continue to research and revise the overall draft law to ensure that the provisions of the draft law clearly demonstrate the normative and policy nature, avoiding just stopping at the level of policy declaration, expressed through the draft content with many general phrases such as "prioritizing development", "promoting attraction", "promoting development", "encouraging development", "having a support regime" ...

Citing evidence from the draft Law, the delegate from Nghe An also commented on many contents on legislative techniques such as the need to explain some undefined technical terms (blockchain technology, distributed ledger technology, etc.); reviewing to remove unnecessary regulations, which are under the Government's responsibility to issue, but are included in the Law.

In addition, the delegate also suggested that it is necessary to review to ensure the consistency of the legal system, avoiding the same issue being presented in different draft laws at the same time, but not consistent with each other.