Overseeing AI: Ombudsmen and New Regulatory Bodies

Accountability arrangements and oversight bodies have become a major policy issue in controlling the power of AI. Ombudsman has become a global institution of legal oversight and guardian of fundamental and human rights. Recently, the ombudsman institution has been drawn in debates on controlling the use of AI. Ombudsmen have been actively raising concerns over legal aspects of automated decision-making and promoting ideas of AI ethics and regulatory models. Moreover, they themselves are also actively considered as overseers of AI. Based on European AI Act EU member states are required to define authorities protecting fundamental rights regarding AI and countries have proposed their ombudsman institutions as key regulators. At the same time there is a global trend of adopting AI officers, a new specific body for overseeing the use of AI. Our paper analyses these trends and assess the pros and cons of the different institutional arrangements both at the organizational-level, including the problems pertaining to mandate stretching and limitations of expertise of the ombudsman, and from a systemic perspective, such as the atomization of accountability in the case the oversight tasks are dispersed over different task specific bodies.