CDT's Travis Hall urges meaningful auditing with consequences

Thank you so much.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

My name is Dr.

Travis Hall.

I represent the Center for Democracy and Technology, a 30-year-old organization dedicated to digital rights and civil liberties online.

And today I would love to talk to you a little bit about the range of issues that you're covering.

I really appreciate the hearing, but I want specifically to talk about third-party auditing.

We appreciate the effort to put in place third-party auditing requirements.

They not only will help to deal with catastrophic risks, but the range of risks that people face from artificial intelligence.

However, as we've seen with LL144, if there are not additional mechanisms in place to incentivize the use and consequences for these audits, they end up turning into being somewhat useless.

So we want to see meaningful independence.

Independent interdisciplinary skills.

There are a lot of regulatory agencies already covering many of these risks, and they can be drawn on, not just technical skills.

Don't just simply

audit the models, think about auditing and assessing systems and use cases.

Make sure that you cover a broader scale of harms.

We heard a lot today about catastrophic harms, but we're already seeing little catastrophes everywhere.

When people lose their benefits or their jobs, those are catastrophes.

Make sure to incentivize incentives or commensurate protections.

And for example, making sure that assessments don't entrench powerful actors.

Also, independent evaluation only really works as one piece in a broader accountability network.

So thank you very much for your time.

We'd love to engage with the council on this and other issues.

And thank you so much.

Up next, we have Danielle Marie Chappius.

If you're online, if you could just unmute and begin.

Daniel Marie Chappius.

All right, we'll go on to Michelle Barnaby.

If you're online, please unmute and begin.