The EU is close to creating the first-ever rules regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI). The new draft legislation for the Artificial Intelligence Act aims to introduce transparency and risk-management controls for AI systems. While this legislation has been on the cards for several years now, with the explosion of AI products over the past year, it became apparent that the proposed law needed amendment to reflect the current technological landscape.
What’s in the draft
The main aim of the AI Act is to ensure that AI technology is environmentally friendly, overseen by people, safe, traceable, transparent, and non-discriminatory. It also seeks to establish a uniform, technology-neutral definition of AI that can be applied to both the AI systems of today and the future; however it may end up evolving.
It also takes a risk-based approach so that the rules and obligations of users and providers depend on the AI’s risk level. So anything that poses a danger to the safety of users would be banned. This includes systems that exploit people’s vulnerabilities, rank people based on race, class, or gender, or utilize techniques to manipulate users purposefully. Some examples of banned intrusive and discriminatory uses of AI systems include:
- Most use cases of remote biometric identification systems
- Biometric categorization systems based on social characteristics like religion, political leaning, race, gender, etc.
- Emotion recognition systems
- Scraping biometric data from CCTV footage or social media to create facial recognition databases
- Predictive policing systems based on profiling
Under this new act, AI systems providers must comply with requirements to register and do business within the EU. If this act becomes law, models like ChatGPT will need to comply with transparency requirements as well as prevent it from publishing summaries of copyrighted data and generating illegal content.
These amendments have come as welcome news to MEPs and digital rights advocates alike. Senior policy advisor at digital advocacy group European Digital Rights, Sarah Chander, told The Verge that these changes have a global significance: “Never has the democratic arm of a regional bloc like the EU made such a significant step on prohibiting tech uses from a human rights perspective.”
While committee co-rapporteur Dragos Tudorache said, “It’s the first piece of legislation of this kind worldwide, which means that the EU can lead the way in making AI human-centric, trustworthy and safe.”
What comes next
The updated draft has been approved by the Internal Market Committee and the Civil Liberties Committee but still needs to be endorsed by the whole EU Parliament before they can negotiate with the Council on the final form of the law. This vote is expected to occur during the 12-15 June session.
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