In its white paper, called Building a better future with data and AI, the ODI said that data needs to be at agreed standards for use in AI but that AI training datasets typically lack robust governance measures throughout the AI life cycle, posing safety, security, trust and ethical challenges related to data protection and fair labour practices.

The ODI said that the government needed to take five actions to help the UK benefit from AI, including making sure there was broad access to high-quality, well-governed public and private sector data to foster a diverse, competitive AI market.

Other recommendations included enforcing data protection and labour rights in the data supply chain, empowering people to have a say in AI data use, updating the intellectual property regime and increasing transparency around data used to train high-risk AI models.

Significant challenges and risks are attached to widescale AI adoption, the ODI said, including the reliance on a handful of machine learning datasets that lack robust governance frameworks.

The ODI said this poses significant risks to both adoption and deployment of AI, as inadequate data governance can lead to biases and unethical practices, undermining the trust and reliability of AI applications in areas such as healthcare, finance and public services.

A lack of transparency also risked hampering efforts to address biases, remove harmful content and ensure compliance with legal standards. 

The ODi said that as a result, it would develop an AI data transparency index to provide a clearer picture of how data transparency varies across different types of system providers.

Other findings included that the public needs safeguarding against the risk of personal data being used illegally to train AI models, and intellectual property law must be urgently updated to protect the UK’s creative industries from unethical AI model training practices.

The rising price of high-quality AI training data also potentially excludes innovators like small businesses and academia, the ODI said.

The ODi is a non-profit co-founded in 2012 by the inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee and AI specialist Sir Nigel Shadbolt to show the value of data and to advocate for its use to affect positive change across the globe.

Shadbolt, executive chair at the ODI, said: “If the UK is to benefit from the extraordinary opportunities presented by AI, the government must look beyond the hype and attend to the fundamentals of a robust data ecosystem built on sound governance and ethical foundations.

“We must build a trustworthy data infrastructure for AI because the feedstock of high-quality AI is high-quality data. The UK has the opportunity to build better data governance systems for AI that ensure we are best placed to take advantage of technological innovations and create economic and social value whilst guarding against potential risks.”