As AI rapidly reshapes the business landscape, Smudge Founder Reuben Bijl argues it’s time for New Zealand to go beyond innovation hype and address the ethical, legal and accountability gaps in how these technologies are developed and used.
Like many in the tech industry, I’m excited by the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence. At Smudge, we’ve spent nearly two decades helping organisations solve problems with digital tools, and AI is undoubtedly one of the most transformative technologies we’ve seen.
The government recently unveiled New Zealand’s first ever AI strategy. The plan aims to reduce barriers and speed up responsible adoption, however it hasn’t sufficiently addressed concerns about how AI is being developed and deployed.
AI is rapidly becoming embedded in how businesses operate. ChatGPT now boasts 500 million weekly users globally, and in New Zealand, a recent One NZ survey found that 77 percent of us have knowingly used AI in the past year. That’s a major shift in a short time.
Despite this rapid growth the government’s strategy is entirely voluntary and fails to put in place clear standards governing the industry. When you visit a doctor or a lawyer, you can trust they’re trained, licensed, and held to professional standards. There’s no equivalent for AI and technology. These tools can offer advice on any subject, no matter how sensitive or high-stakes, without any oversight or accountability. It’s a dangerous precedent, especially as these systems are increasingly embedded into everyday tools and services.
There’s also no guarantee the information provided is accurate. AI-generated content often comes with a small disclaimer: “This information may be incorrect.” That tiny caveat is doing a lot of heavy lifting, absolving the platform from any responsibility while placing the risk squarely on the user.
This kind of shift, toward ever-present, seemingly helpful AI, carries real risk, not just for individuals but for businesses too. It’s easy to be drawn in by the speed, scale, and low cost of AI-driven interactions, but when the information is unverified and there’s no accountability for the outcome, we risk more than just getting things wrong. We risk eroding trust, reputational harm and making poor decisions based on flawed advice.
If we go back a step further, there’s also a lack of transparency around how AI models are trained, what data they use and how much of it is copyrighted or scraped from websites without permission. It begs the question, if a model generates something based on someone else’s work, who’s liable? The company that built it? The developer who deployed it? Or the business that used it?
We’ve seen this pattern before. We sleepwalked into the world of social media and are only now dealing with its consequences, including its impact on young people, misinformation, and the collapse of traditional news models. New Zealand’s media landscape has been gutted in part due to global tech giants republishing content without paying for it. Now, AI threatens to do the same, but at even greater scale and speed.
Unfortunately, AI is also being used in scams targeting vulnerable New Zealanders. Every week there’s a new story about a deepfake video or a voice clone tricking someone out of money. The technology is making these scams more convincing and harder to detect, and yet, the focus is always on the scammer as opposed to regulating the technology which made the scam possible.
To be clear, I’m not anti-AI. I’m pro-innovation, and I believe these tools have the potential to do tremendous good and rapidly increase productivity. I also believe that innovation without awareness carries serious risks.
What the government has missed is that it needs to start with education. We need the public to be informed so they understand the trade-offs, risks, and ethical considerations that come with using AI.
It’s also important to remember that when we use software made by large American tech companies, we’re not just importing the technology, we’re importing their way of thinking. California’s low-regulation environment favours corporates and accelerates innovation, often at the expense of public safeguards. The things we find troubling here, like the lack of guidance or oversight, are standard operating practice there.
New Zealand has an opportunity to do things differently. We’re a small, connected country with a strong culture of trust and integrity, and we can put ethics and accountability at the heart of how we adopt these tools.
As business leaders, we don’t get to hide behind the algorithm. We need to take responsibility for the tools we choose to use and demand they are ethical as well as innovative. The Government’s strategy has opened the conversation, now it’s up to us to take it further.
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