Law360 (May 7, 2024, 11:08 PM EDT) -- The U.S. Department of Justice is using artificial intelligence to bolster its investigations, including into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, said U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco on Tuesday at a cybersecurity conference at which she dove into the beneficial uses of AI alongside its threats to security and democracy.

During a keynote address at the 2024 RSA Conference in San Francisco, Monaco oscillated between what she views as the many promises of AI and its many potential risks and how the DOJ is already leveraging AI tools in its everyday work.

The DOJ is using AI "to do everything from sifting through and understanding and triaging the more than 1 million tips that the FBI receives annually — to make sure that we are focusing human attention on the most important tips and reports that we receive right away," Monaco said.

"We are using it also to identify and understand and trace the source of opioids in our investigations. We are using it to sift through and understand huge volumes of data and evidence in some of our most important and significant investigations, including the Jan. 6 investigation," she said.

But Monaco, speaking on a panel with Fei-Fei Li, co-director of Stanford University's Human-Centered AI Institute, and Miriam Vogel, president and CEO of EqualAI, a nonprofit created to reduce AI harm and promote good governance, said she remains "constitutionally focused" on threats and has many concerns about AI.

As Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser to former President Barack Obama, Monaco said she was tuned in to "all of the bad in the world" and that her briefings on those many threats prompted the former president to nickname her "Dr. Doom."

Monaco continued down that path Tuesday when she laid out what she described as a "parade of horribles" related to AI's risks, including its potential to supercharge disinformation and misinformation, hacking and the ability of countries to control what citizens see, read and hear online.

"We are concerned about the ability of AI to lower the barriers to entry for criminals of all stripes, the ability of AI to supercharge malicious actors, whether it's nation-states who are using it as a tool of repression and to supercharge their ability to engage in digital authoritarianism, the ability of AI to supercharge the cyber threat — to allow hackers to find vulnerabilities at scale and speed, and to exploit them," Monaco said.

DOJ officials are also deeply concerned about AI's ability to interfere with elections, she said.

To get ahead of the threats AI poses to elections in 2024, in which roughly 4 billion people are expected to head to the polls globally, Monaco said the DOJ is focused on protecting the most fundamental of rights, including the right to vote and the right for citizens to have their voices heard.

"We are acutely aware of the risks posed by AI when it comes to the right to vote and, again, the ability of malicious actors to disseminate misinformation, disinformation, to spread — at best — confusion and — at worst — real chaos and distrust in our system," Monaco said.

"We are on the watch and we will be very, very focused on using all the tools we have to get after those who are trying to deprive individuals of having their voices heard," Monaco said.

In response, Li stressed the importance of not focusing too much on the "doom," saying she's concerned about some AI-related legislation that she believes is "over-indexing on existential crises."

Such bills, she said, are "sucking the oxygen away from important societal issues" and may "inadvertently criminalize open source community efforts, which is part of the fertilizer for this country's AI and technology ecosystem," Li said.

Monaco agreed with Li, saying it's important to not be so distracted by the perceived existential threat that it reduces the focus on how to protect against AI being used to exacerbate existing biases.

That's why, Monaco said, the DOJ launched its Justice AI initiative, referring to a series of meetings with stakeholders from across government, civil society, academia and industry to study the use of AI in the criminal justice system.

Justice AI, she said, is focused on gathering a full range of perspectives to ensure the benefits of AI are broadly felt and accessible, while being attentive to their risks. Justice AI's findings will inform a report on the DOJ's use of AI that will be delivered to President Joe Biden at the end of the year.

"We have to be focused on putting those guardrails around our existing use so that we are making sure that we are harnessing those benefits, that we are not so focused on the existential threat that we aren't making sure we're using this deeply important technology consistent with our values," Monaco said.

--Editing by Michael Watanabe.

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