Page 94 - Cyber Defense Magazine for August 2020

Build Your AI Incident Response Plan… Before It’s Too

Late
By Patrick Hall* and Andrew Burt**

* Patrick Hall is principal scientist at bnh.ai, a boutique law firm focused on AI and analytics, and an
adjunct professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at GWU.

** Andrew Burt is managing partner at bnh.ai and chief legal officer at Immuta.

Artificial intelligence can fail. It can also be attacked. When a failure or attack spins out of control, this is
a major AI incident. There have been over 1,000 public reports of AI incidents in recent years. Yet many
organizations are operating nascent AI efforts without incident response plans - using AI, in other words,
without any clear understanding of what to do when it fails.

Why? Organizations simply aren’t thinking about AI failures, they’re focused on AI successes instead.
Indeed, there’s a great deal of hype on the positive side of this technology, and deservedly so. It can
make and save money, and it can even be transformational. However, AI is probably more likely to fail
than traditional enterprise software, at least as of today. It’s for this reason that some have called the
technology the “high-interest credit card of technical debt.” Governments around the world are

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