What Does The EU’s Landmark Regulation Mean For The Future Of AI?

In this past year, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has grown to become an industry favorite.

This is because it’s made a lot of processes easier, faster and more accurate. While AI itself has been around for a long time, its most popular branch, generative AI, has only recently come to the forefront. We mean, ChatGPT was first launched on November 30, 2022 – just over a year ago.

However, there has always been a concern regarding its usage, primarily surrounding its ethical development. Over time there have been various industry experts calling for a pause on its research and development until we all were sure where AI is going. Of course, that didn’t happen but various governments have been vocal on imposing control measures on the technology.

Even the UK, along with the US, recently drew up The Guidelines For AI Safety, which was supported by 16 other countries (read more).

Now, the European Union (EU) has an announcement regarding something similar. What’s it all about? Let’s explore!

What Did The EU Announce?

“Deal!” That’s all Thierry Breton, European Commissioner, posted after the commencement of the 3-day “marathon” talks between the Council presidency and the European Parliament’s negotiators.

To be fair, Breton did keep his followers updated through a string of posts on X (formerly Twitter), while the single-word update was followed by "#AIAct”.

The point is, after much negotiation, the Council and the Parliament struck a deal, bringing in the first rules for AI in the world in the EU, albeit a provisional agreement.

The deal, which was finalized on Friday, came after nearly 15 hours of negotiations on the day, which was followed by a 22-hour long debate on the previous day.

Of course, since this is a provisional agreement, the final draft or rules could still change in the coming days when the two sides will meet again to finalize the details.

TechDogs-"A Screenshot Of A Post On X By European Commissioner Thierry Breton"

Source

What Are The Main Elements Of The Agreement?

Essentially, the rules will help govern high-impact general-purpose AI models that could potentially cause systemic risks in the future and high-risk AI systems.

It also consisted of a revised system of governance that offers some enforcement powers at EU level.

The agreement also extended the list of prohibitions but with the possibility to use remote biometric identification by law enforcement authorities in public spaces, subject to safeguards.

Furthermore, it brought better protection of rights through the obligation for deployers of high-risk AI systems to conduct a fundamental rights impact assessment before putting an AI system into use.

The agreement also covered a range of banned applications, which included, biometric categorization systems using sensitive characteristics (like political, religious, philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation, race markers), untargeted scraping of facial images, emotion recognition in the workplace and educational institutions, manipulative AI systems, AI that can expose vulnerabilities of people and social scoring based on social behavior or personal characteristics.

On the other hand, it also clarified that the regulations don’t apply to “areas outside the scope of EU law”, AI systems used exclusively for military, defense, research or innovation purposes and for non-professional reasons.

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What Did Concerned People Say?

Breton spoke in a press conference, saying, “Europe has positioned itself as a pioneer, understanding the importance of its role as a global standard setter. This is yes, I believe, a historical day."

Carme Artigas, Spanish secretary of state for digitalisation and artificial intelligence, said, “This is a historical achievement, and a huge milestone towards the future! Today’s agreement effectively addresses a global challenge in a fast-evolving technological environment on a key area for the future of our societies and economies. And in this endeavour, we managed to keep an extremely delicate balance: boosting innovation and uptake of artificial intelligence across Europe whilst fully respecting the fundamental rights of our citizens.”

Co-rapporteur Dragos Tudorache (Renew, Romania) said, “The EU is the first in the world to set in place robust regulation on AI, guiding its development and evolution in a human-centric direction. The AI Act sets rules for large, powerful AI models, ensuring they do not present systemic risks to the Union and offers strong safeguards for our citizens and our democracies against any abuses of technology by public authorities.”

Svenja Hahn, German MEP and shadow rapporteur for the European AI Act, on behalf of the liberal Renew Europe group, said, “In 38 hours of negotiations over three days we were able to prevent massive overregulation of AI innovation and safeguard rule of law principles in the use of AI in law enforcement. We succeeded in preventing biometric mass surveillance. Despite an uphill battle over several days of negotiations, it was not possible to achieve a complete ban on real-time biometric identification against the massive headwind from the member states.”

Do you think the EU is heading in the right direction with its stringent laws governing artificial intelligence (AI)? Do you think other regions should follow suit or do you think such measures will restrict the progress of AI?

Let us know in the comments below!

First published on Mon, Dec 11, 2023

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