Artificial Intelligence and Public Law

This chapter uses the right to explanation as an example of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) confronts the law and presents ideas towards their reconciliation. It presents a foundational argument for public law principles to be championed for their ability to foster AI implementation, whilst protecting hard won fights for equality, fairness, and justice. AI, in its simplest form, is a classification task. The chapter takes a dataset as input and classifies it in a way to make decisions or determine an outcome. As there are a number of different approaches to AI in general, as well as in law, one can also make a distinction between the internal legal applications and external applications of AI. The main challenge for AI lies in the gap between human and machine understanding. The general right to explanation exists in almost every jurisdiction in Europe, nationally and supra-nationally in the form of the European Convention of Human Rights and the General Data Protection Regulation