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AI-Cafe presents: Who pays the bill when an AI-system causes damage?
Dr. Jan De Bruyne
(Research Expert (Tort law and AI) and Lecturer at KU Leuven Centre for IT & IP Law (CiTiP); Assistant Professor at eLaw Center for Law and Digital Technologies Leiden)
AI has become increasingly more prominent in our daily professional and social lives. Although it brings many benefits, the increase of AI will present many challenges as well. In addition to several ethical issues, regulatory challenges, a recurring topic that has risen in several supranational policy documents is the question of who can and should be held liable when an AI-system causes damage.
This is not surprising considering that AI-systems are increasingly involved in accidents (e.g. autonomous vehicles). In this seminar, Dr. Jan De Bruyne will first give an overview of some recent initiatives regarding liability. Once this general overview has been given, he will further discuss some specific legal challenges related to tort and product liability, as well as provide some normative proposals that can be relied upon by policy-makers.
Dr. Jan De Bruyne obtained a Master’s degree in Political Sciences at the University of Ghent (2008) and a Master’s degree in Law (2012) at the same university. He has been an assistant in comparative and private law at the Ghent University Faculty of Law and Criminology since October 2012. He successfully defended his Ph.D. in September 2018 on a topic dealing with the liability of third-party certifiers. His Ph.D. was published by Kluwer Law International. During his research, he became interested in liability for damage caused by AI-systems. Jan De Bruyne was a postdoctoral researcher at the Ghent University Faculty of Law and Criminology working on robots and tort law from October 2018 to October 2020.
He started working at CiTiP in October 2019 as a postdoctoral researcher on legal aspects of AI and as a senior researcher within the Flemish Knowledge Centre for Data & Society (KDS). As from November 2020, he works at CITIP as a research expert on tort law and AI. He is still associated with the KDS. He has recently been appointed as an assistant professor in law and digital technologies at the eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies in Leiden (0,2 FTE).