On October 22, the "Bridging East and West, Building Dreams Ahead" Lecture Series was held in Conference Room 101 of International College(IC), Xiamen University(XMU). Dr. Stephanie Law, Associate Professor of Law School and Director of Internationalization at the University of Southampton, UK, was invited to deliver a keynote lecture. Centering on the core proposition "What Role for Law in Regulating Artificial Intelligence(AI)?" she engaged in an interdisciplinary dialogue with faculty and students of the college that combined jurisprudential depth with real-world concerns.

During the lecture, Dr. Law first approached the topic by asking "What is artificial intelligence?" and compared the definitions of AI from a technical perspective and a legal perspective—AI no longer merely follows established rules but learns patterns from massive amounts of data to make predictions or generate content. She then developed a hypothetical case: a company uses a recruitment AI trained on ten years of resume data, which develops a systematic bias against women because male applicants predominate in the historical data—"Who should be held responsible—the developer, the employer, or the applicant? And how would an applicant even know they were rejected by an algorithm?" With this series of probing questions, Dr. Law made the point clear: these are precisely the questions the law must answer.

When explaining "why the rule of law applies to AI," Dr. Law systematically examined the tensions between rule-of-law principles—clear rules, equal application, no one being above the law, and the possibility of challenge—and the challenges in AI scenarios, such as opaque models, the entrenchment of automated decision-making, bias in training data, and the ambiguity of responsible parties. She also pointed out that the speed of technological iteration, the national boundaries of law, the difficulty of definition, and the balance between protecting rights and encouraging innovation constitute four major practical challenges of AI governance, and emphasized that law is only one tool—technical standards, corporate ethics, and public AI literacy are equally indispensable.

At the end of the lecture, Dr. Law exchanged views with faculty and students on topics such as "when AI can be used and when it should be prohibited," "whether developers or users should bear responsibility when AI causes harm," and "whether rules should be national or global," and further explored cutting-edge propositions such as superintelligence, AI consciousness, and rights. She concluded: rules concern fairness, risk determines the appropriate scope, and everyone has the right to ask "why" and to question AI's answers.

In the future, IC will continue to hold such high-level, cutting-edge lectures, bringing together high-quality academic resources from around the world to continuously empower the cultivation of high-caliber talents with an international perspective.