Elon Musk and xAI took a loss in court on Thursday in their effort to kill a California law regulating artificial intelligence.
A judge on Thursday denied the preliminary injunction requested by Musk’s scandal-plagued AI company as it seeks to stop a law that requires companies to reveal how they train their AI-based algorithms. The law went into effect in January, and xAI challenged on First and Fifth Amendment grounds, Ars Technica reported.
The company “argued the law violated its free-speech rights under the U.S. Constitution and would force the company to reveal trade secrets about how its AI models are trained,” Reuters reported. But the judge determined that xAI had not demonstrated its suit is likely to succeed at this stage. Therefore, the company’s lawsuit will continue, but xAI will have to comply with the law for the time being.
Ars Technica explained what the law actually does:
The law requires AI developers whose models are accessible in the state to clearly explain which dataset sources were used to train models, when the data was collected, if the collection is ongoing, and whether the datasets include any data protected by copyrights, trademarks, or patents. Disclosures would also clarify whether companies licensed or purchased training data and whether the training data included any personal information. It would also help consumers assess how much synthetic data was used to train the model, which could serve as a measure of quality. Advocates for ethical AI say this visibility can help explain how an algorithm-based tool functions and whether, for example, it is enabling discrimination or fueling the dissemination of misinformation or other harmful content on social media. Without such transparency, AI tools like those developed by xAI — which the Trump administration has blessed with government contracts and access to classified materials — can function essentially as “black boxes” whose operation is inscrutable to anyone outside the company. That’s certainly not an ideal scenario in a world in which driverless cars, AI-generated social media content and autonomous weapons are among the emerging technologies.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
