Governing the Unknown: Can We Regulate What We Cannot Predict?

There is a question that has been on my mind for a while now. I am finishing a master of science in cybersecurity, and I am choosing governance, risk, and compliance as a career. One question keeps coming back to me. Generative artificial intelligence produces things that did not exist before the moment it produced them. So how do we govern something when even the people who built it do not know what it will generate in the future?

Traditional systems do what they are told. Their behaviour stays inside a space that the builders already defined. Generative systems do not work this way. Older governance frameworks assume that you can specify the thing being regulated. Generative AI breaks that assumption. How do you write a rule for an output that does not exist yet?

The field has mostly responded by shifting its focus away from the output itself. Instead of certifying what a system will say, frameworks now try to govern the process behind it. This includes documentation, red teaming, and ongoing monitoring after deployment, instead of one approval at launch. Other approaches govern the boundary around the system rather than its content. This includes human review for high-stakes decisions, mandatory disclosure, and liability rules that assign responsibility even when the harm was not foreseeable. If we cannot predict the output, the quiet admission seems to be that we should regulate who is accountable when something goes wrong, instead of regulating the output itself.

I understand the logic. I am not sure it is enough. A rule that governs process without governing outcome only catches problems after they have already happened to someone. Liability compensates for harm. It does not prevent it.

I do not have an answer yet, and I am not sure the field does either. If generative AI produces the unknown by nature, is it possible to govern it in advance at all? Or are we permanently limited to governing what happens after the fact? I would like to hear how others are thinking about this.