Central idea: The European Parliament has recently reached a preliminary deal on a new draft of the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act, after two years of drafting and negotiations.

Regulating AI

• The need for regulation of AI technologies has been highlighted worldwide.
• EU lawmakers have urged world leaders to hold a summit to brainstorm ways to control the development of advanced AI systems.

EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act

• The aim of the AI Act is to bring transparency, trust, and accountability to AI technologies and to mitigate risks to the safety, health, fundamental rights, and democratic values of the EU.
• The legislation seeks to address ethical questions and implementation challenges in various sectors, from healthcare and education to finance and energy.
• It seeks to strike a balance between promoting the uptake of AI while mitigating or preventing harms associated with certain uses of the technology.
• It aims to strengthen Europe’s position as a global hub of excellence in AI from the lab to the market and ensure that AI in Europe respects the 27-country bloc’s values and rules.
• The Act delegates the process of standardization or creation of precise technical requirements for AI technologies to the EU’s expert standard-setting bodies in specific sectors.

Details of the Act

• Defining AI: AI is broadly defined as “software that is developed with one or more of the techniques that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, generate outputs such as content, predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing the environments they interact with.”
• Four risk-category: The Act outlines four risk categories:

1. Unacceptable: The use of technologies in the unacceptable risk category is prohibited with little exception, including real-time facial and biometric identification systems in public spaces, China-like systems of social scoring, subliminal techniques to distort behavior, and technologies that exploit vulnerabilities of certain populations.
2. High: The focus is on AI in the high-risk category, prescribing pre-and post-market requirements for developers and users of such systems and establishing an EU-wide database of high-risk AI systems. The requirements for conformity assessments for high-risk AI systems must be met before they can make it to the market.
3. Limited and minimal: AI systems in the limited and minimal risk category can be used with a few requirements like transparency obligations.

Recent proposal on General Purpose AI

• Recent updates to EU rules to regulate generative AI, including language model-based chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are discussed.
• Lawmakers are debating whether all forms of general-purpose AI will be designated high-risk.
• Companies deploying generative AI tools are required to disclose any copyrighted material used to develop their systems.

Reaction from the AI Industry

• Some industry players have welcomed the legislation, while others have expressed concerns about the potential impact on innovation and competitiveness.
• Companies are worried about transparency requirements, fearing that they may have to divulge trade secrets.
• Lawmakers and consumer groups have criticized the legislation for not fully addressing the risks associated with AI systems.

Global governance of AI

• The US currently lacks comprehensive AI regulation and has taken a hands-off approach.
• The Biden administration released a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights (AIBoR) that outlines the harms of AI and five principles for mitigating them.
• China has come out with some of the world’s first nationally binding regulations targeting specific types of algorithms and AI.
• China enacted a law to regulate recommendation algorithms, with a focus on how they disseminate information.
• While India is still stuck with the Personal Data Protection Bill.

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