European Union Reaches Landmark Deal in Artificial Intelligence Regulation
The AI Act aims to create safeguards against risks like the automation of jobs, hurting national security, and spreading misinformation.
- Officials of the European Union reached a deal on comprehensive AI laws, including systems such as ChatGPT.
- While voting on the laws is expected to take place in early 2024, they are not expected to go into effect until 2025.
European Union legislators reached a deal on major rules to regulate the use and development of artificial intelligence in the region, including systems such as ChatGPT and the use of AI in biometric surveillance by government bodies. This makes the EU the first in the world to enact laws associated with artificial intelligence after drafting the rules in June 2023.
The agreement on the law, known as the AI Act, makes it mandatory for general-purpose AI systems and models such as ChatGPT to meet transparency requirements before being launched on the market, acknowledging copyright law, summaries of data used in training AI models, and technical documents.
Furthermore, systems that invite a higher risk will have to undergo evaluations and adversarial testing and send reports about energy efficiency, security, and serious incidents to the European Commission. The deal has taken years in the making, with member states and members of the European parliament tussling over how AI should be controlled to have the best interest of humans.
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In terms of government bodies, they can only use AI for real-time biometric surveillance of people suspected of highly serious crimes or in cases of a potential terrorist threat. The regulations ban the extraction of facial images from the internet and/or CCTV or any kind of categorization for racial, religious, social, or cultural segregation.
People will be able to complain and demand explanations for potential abuse of AI systems, with violations resulting in fines of at least 1.5% of the offending entity’s global turnover.
On the other hand, European companies have raised concerns that the rules were excessively restrictive and could hurt innovation that could have aided local industries. The new laws will be approved by early 2024. However, they will likely go into effect only in 2025. The laws will also likely be seen as a blueprint for other countries to set their own laws.
The need to regulate AI has gained urgency in the past few months following the release of ChatGPT, and the ramifications of AI on the global industry are expected to be worth trillions of dollars, making the new rules critical in upcoming years.
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