David welcomes Will Charlesworth as the new host of the "Law with AI" podcast, setting the stage for a deep dive into the intersection of artificial intelligence, law, policy, and ethics.

Will, a partner at Keystone Law and an expert in media and intellectual property law, shares his vision for the podcast, emphasising the rapid developments in AI and their impact on legal frameworks.

The discussion highlights the importance of understanding how AI is reshaping business models and legal practices, particularly concerning data privacy and intellectual property issues.

Both hosts reflect on the challenges businesses face in navigating AI regulations and the potential legal ramifications of ignoring these complexities.

With a lineup of engaging guests and topics, this podcast promises to be an essential resource for legal professionals and anyone interested in the evolving landscape of AI and law.

Takeaways:

• The podcast will explore the intersection of artificial intelligence, law, policy, and ethics.
• Will Charlesworth aims to discuss how AI is transforming the legal landscape.
• The show will feature experts discussing AI's impact on various legal fields including fintech and IP.
• There will be an emphasis on understanding the legal implications of using AI in business.
• Listeners can expect discussions that break down complex AI-related legal topics into understandable segments.
• The podcast intends to inform legal professionals and the curious about AI's evolving role in society.

Hello, everybody.

Welcome to the Law with AI.

I'm your host David, for today.

And in this episode, what we're going to do is we're going to introduce the actual show host that's going to carry the show forward from here, Will Charlesworth.

And I'm going to let Will's been on some of my other podcasts before, so I know Will, but I'm going to let him start off by introducing himself, and then we're going to just get into a quick discussion about what Will's plans are for the show, the types of people that he wants to talk to, and the types of topics that he wants to cover.

So Will, welcome to your show.

Thank you very much, David.

It's great to be here.

And thank you for asking me to host this, the law with AI podcast.

I'm viewing as a wonderful opportunity to explore some really interesting issues that are arising at a very rapid pace with AI.

In terms of my background, I'm a partner at Keystone Law.

I'm a solicitor, I'm a media lawyer.

So I specialize in both reputation management and also intellectual property law as well.

So in terms of that, it covers media content.

And I'm also a member of the UK parliament's all parliamentary group on artificial intelligence, which brings me into the AI space, which I've been a member of for a little while now.

And that's led me to meet some really interesting and exciting people in this space.

Amazing.

And yeah, I knew you were in the APPG, which is quite cool.

So what sort of topics do you think you'd like to talk about?

I think in terms of how I see the podcast planning out is going to be diving into the intersection between artificial intelligence, law, policy and ethics.

And I see ethics also in particular as being a very interesting issue because people are slowly coming around to this.

I think we focused a lot initially on the technological side, and from that point of view, the efficiencies that AI brings and how it reshapes, certainly from a commercial point of view, business models, but also affects our everyday lives as well as we are now pretty reliant on AI in some respects.

And I don't mean whether you open chat GPT and ask it lots of questions every day, I mean, just generally, it is a part of all of the technology that we use anywhere.

But certainly from the ethics and policy point of view, that is how businesses will adopt AI and how they apply and they use that.

I'll be trying to break down how AI is transforming the legal landscape as well.

So from its role in legal research, which is possibly where certainly as a lawyer I noticed the initial introduction of it and going into one of the areas that I specialize in intellectual property law and data privacy as well.

And that's a really hot button, hot button topic at the moment.

And it's still something that people aren't particularly focusing on, or I think they're not necessarily prioritizing it as I think they probably should be.

And you probably say, well, you're a lawyer, you're living and breathing this space, you're going to take an unusually in depth focus on it and I would hope so.

Yes, quite right.

Exactly.

Quite rightly too.

That's what my clients want me to do.

And that's what I find particularly interesting as well because it goes to the ethics point and it goes into protecting people's fundamental human rights as well.

I'm not a human rights lawyer, but I think it cuts to, to the heart of who we are as a society as well.

So I'll be speaking with experts from various legal fields, including fintech, financial technology, law, as I say, intellectual property.

So my background is as an intellectual property litigator.

So I deal with IP disputes.

So I'm involved with brand protection, certainly from copyright, trademarks point of view.

But I'll be speaking with lawyers that cover other aspects of IP, particularly where that has, where AI is helping in terms of patents is a particularly large area and also in how AI and the use of the technology is shaping commercial agreements and how that's benefiting businesses.

That's a big one.

Just sorry to jump in to that's a big one, I think, as well.

And I think a lot of businesses, I mean I've worked in the startup, I've worked for startup businesses and then that sort of, I think it's its own vertical.

But I've worked with startups for a long, long time.

And I think one of the interesting things that you and I have talked about in the past, and I know you want to cover this on the show as well, is again that downstream, like what's the impact of a company?

Like how does a company need to protect itself in its agreements and its terms and conditions and in its contracts when it using AI on whatever data.

So it could be doing something with a customer's own data for them internally or it could be providing a tool that that customer then uses that's maybe, you know, outward facing.

And I think this is something that a lot of boards haven't really dug into yet and are probably scared to death to even scratch the surface of, you know, potentially how, you know, how they may be opening themselves up to, to potential litigation later and that sort of thing.

So I'm not sure that just some, one line, one sentence in a contract saying, oh, by the way, we might use AI on some of the projects is enough.

And I know you want to dig into that, and I think that's going to be really, really interesting.

Thank you.

Yes.

And you've touched upon a really interesting area, and it takes me back a little way to a couple of years ago when nfts were particularly popular and they were the hot button issue of the time.

One of the key issues around that was regulation, because there are no specific regulations targeting nfts in particular by name, but there are lots of other issues such as data protection issues and also from gambling and other aspects around there.

And what I found was that the more established clients and companies had to take a big decision and say, well, actually, let's get some advice on what the regulations may be or what's the legal position around this, and then we will need to find a way around it, a way to solve that, to solve that issue, to make sure that we're fully compliant.

And that is the correct approach.

But a lot of people were just putting their heads in the sand and saying, well, no, we don't want to deal with this.

If we don't ask a question, we don't have to deal with the issue which is in law, never, ever, ever the case.

Isn't that the best way to deal with anything?

Just ignore it, it'll go away.

I suspect everybody's got a drawer in their house somewhere where lots of pieces of important paper are pushed there and that will be dealt with on a rainy day.

So I understand it's part of our human nature is we need to, we want to prioritize the things that we think will give us most benefit immediately.

And those other things that we see as being a pandora's box, we particularly want to shy away from.

Or it's not a procrastination, but it's always just, let's put it off, let's put it off, let's deal with it.

And it becomes such a big issue that eventually it has to be dealt with, but it doesn't have to be dealt with in that way.

My experience of working with clients, and certainly how I would be advising them, is that we just need to sit down and have an open conversation to understand how the technology works and what it's doing with AI that's a slightly.

It can be a difficult one in that has a black box type of structure, often where you're not 100% sure exactly what those algorithms are.

But in terms of data, I'm not going to.

It sounds very geeky in data flows, going into it in a level of detail like that, you can guide people through it and it's not a big scary topic that people want to make it out to be.

And certainly there's lots of press around AI, and AI is very exciting and people who are pushing AI technology want to make it sound as revolutionary and as complex and as modern as possible, which it is.

But at the heart of it, when you get down to it, essentially it's software and you're putting an input into it and it's giving you an output and you need to understand what the input is, what's happening with that input, and as much as you can.

And then I.

What's what, how the output is going is going to be used.

That's a really basic way of doing it, but that's, you know, that's how, that's how we can approach it.

So in terms of the podcast, we'll be discussing issues like that.

It won't be going into detailed legal advice, for obvious reasons, mainly because everybody's situation is very different and it requires a deeper dive.

But certainly the most interesting issues we will definitely be covering, we will also be busting some myths around AI as well.

And as I said, meeting the people behind it.

So it's not just other lawyers, other people in the legal profession, barristers, solicitors, who are advising clients in this space, but it's also other professionals who are affected by AI, who are also operating in the advice or assisting lawyers, certainly in terms of fraud detection, crypto security companies, blockchain, I've got a very exciting guest coming on, all will be revealed.

See what I did there.

And I had this podcast work, bit.

Of a teaser, who is a revolutionary company and advisory in the blockchain, in the blockchain sector, which is incorporating AI as well.

We've got tech startups, even to advisers around autonomous vehicles, and how AI plays a part in that, because AI has been a part of autonomous vehicles or the project of autonomous vehicles for quite a long time now and we still haven't quite mastered how that works because there's a lot of things around regulation and policy and, you know, so, and that could be a podcast series all of its own, and it may be, but for the moment we're going to look at the more, the most interesting areas and the more relevant areas as well.

So, in summary, and I've waffled on quite a bit, but if, whether you're a legal, professional policymaker, or just curious about AI's impact in the law, the podcast will keep you informed and ahead of the curve, and it will introduce you to some very interesting people that you might not get to meet or might not get to hear about, who are operating within this space, who will be shaping the future.

Love it.

Done.

That's perfect.

Nice little sound clip there at the end.

I can cut that into a beautiful little social post to introduce the show.

Thank you.

No, no, it's really interesting, and there's a lot of stuff in there to unpack.

And something you said earlier made me think of, I think it was Mark Andreessen that was talking about basically that in Silicon Valley, the startups, they pretty much just ignore any law or any regulation that they have to do and they just go off and build something because 90% of companies don't make it anyway.

They don't, they can't worry about that in the beginning.

It's like they just push it down the road and they're like, if we become a huge billion dollar company, then the lawyers will sort of out.

Yes, the lawyers are sort of.

By which point we'd have had our IPO, we would have sold out for billions, and we don't really care in the future.

Exactly.

So, yeah, they've had their money and they leave it for someone else.

And while that's funny, and I totally understand it from a, from a founder perspective, and some things you just have to go, I can't even worry about that right now because that's like later guys problem, I think where we're getting now, and this is part of the reason why I wanted to have the podcast and I think you want to have these discussions, is, I think a lot of those companies that started off, we had a huge explosion of AI companies that were using the APIs into chat, into OpenAI and all the other platforms, and blah, blah, blah.

I think some of those have gone by the wayside already, but a lot of those are now becoming successful.

And a lot of businesses are now starting to say, actually this thing is something that we might use.

And they're getting to that point where you do need to start thinking about these topics.

And that's why it's important to have this discussion.

So I think the timing couldn't be better.

And like I said, I'm really looking forward to it I don't know.

I mean, if you don't have anything else to add, I think that's the perfect introduction to what you're doing, and I think we can just crack on with the shows.

Thank you very much.

No, that's great.

Yeah, that was just working from some notes, but thinking about it as I kind of went on, that covered exactly the reason for the podcast and why it is going to be very interesting and.

No, thank you very much.

That's great.

And as I say, yeah, I'm recording the first one this afternoon, and that should be very interesting.

So that's with Christian Devatovan, the blockchain guy who has some very interesting views on AI regulation and his being a technology consultancy and things like that.

I anticipate that will be a very interesting first start, and then other ones are scheduled.

You'll let us know later.

Just for everybody listening, this is early October, and the plan is to have our first couple of episodes out by the end of the month.

And then I think, like with all the other shows on the, with AIFM inside the network, it's every other week, so we'll have a, that's, that'll be the cadence for everybody.

And I can't remember, what day did we say we wanted to put them.

We were doing Mondays, weren't we?

I think so, yes.

Yeah, I think so.

Actually, we may look to, yeah, not this Monday, but Monday.

So Monday the 21st, I think will be the first, will be the first show that goes out.

So, yeah, if anyone's listening, look forward to that.

I can't wait to hear the discussion and, yeah, we'll see where we go from there.

Thank you very much.

I'm very excited.

Thank you again, David, for asking me to be part of this, and I look forward to having some very interesting conversations around AI going forward.

Thank you very much.

Brilliant.

Thanks, Will.

We'll see you later.

Thanks, David.

Thank you.