What happens when you need to play by the rules as “good” AI takes on “bad” AI? If you’re a super creative legal eagle like Clarissa Cerda, you win by changing the game’s perspective of you as a player.
I’m both a former lawyer and former digital media academic who is well aware that legal systems struggle to keep up with the rapid pace of technological innovation, sometimes lagging by decades. But with the existential impact of artificial intelligence, we can’t afford to wait for the law to align with the facts on the ground.
Case in point: criminals are using AI to easily mimic our voices and gain access to our financial accounts. To combat this, technology vendors such as Clarissa’s Pindrop (underwriter to my documentary, The Only Human in the Room) offer a voice verification layer to protect our assets when we call customer service.
But innovation often collides with regulation. Plaintiffs in an Illinois lawsuit argued that they never gave consent to have their biometric data recorded and analyzed, contravening a strict state privacy law. Clarissa countered with a brilliant maneuver: she argued that Pindrop was exempt under that law because providing this critical authentication service meant it was engaging in “financial activities.”
The federal courts agreed with that novel interpretation, setting judicial precedent for a tech vendor in this space to be classified as a “financial institution.”
As Clarissa explains in the clip above, the courts recognized that you simply can’t do banking today without that verification piece.
“They actually said it was so closely related to banking activities that it is considered financial in nature. I think authentication is becoming part of the financial infrastructure... and the courts have recognized that in this case, it means we are now subject to the same standards that every financial institution is.”
This ruling yet further evidence of how verification is replacing trust, in our day-to-day institutional infrastructure. We’re increasingly called upon to prove who we say we are, and these new systems ostensibly make it easier to do so.
Yet, for all this digital scaffolding, Clarissa’s ultimate takeaway is surprisingly analog. Navigating a landscape where AI fights AI only reaffirms the one thing algorithms can’t replicate.
“I believe in the humans. And so a lot of these rules apply to what’s happening in the digital world... where you don’t have the human in the loop. What it does for humanity is it reaffirms that we have to keep that human contact. It cannot be replaced and superseded.”
