The European Parliament adopted its version of the Artificial Intelligence Act.

On June 14, 2023, the European Parliament adopted its position on the Artificial Intelligence Act (hereinafter "AI Regulation"). While the risk-based approach remains the principle, the European Parliament extends the list of AI-prohibited practices and focuses on generative AI, given its recent and exponential development.

Regulating AI systems remains a hot topic. Europe's digital ambition comprises ensuring that AI systems used in the European Union are safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory, and environmentally friendly. The AI Act process started in 2021 with a proposal from the Commission, and has since been debated in Parliament and Council. On June 14, the European Parliament voted on its amendments to the proposed AI Regulation.

While the Council already adopted its position last December, the European Parliament modified the initial proposal introducing a series of substantial amendments. The rules aim to promote the uptake of human-centric and trustworthy AI and protect health, safety, fundamental rights, and democracy from its harmful effects. The amendments introduced by the European Parliament are the following :

Prohibited AI practices

While the AI Regulation still follows a risk-based approach and establishes obligations for providers and those deploying AI systems depending on the level of risk AI can generate, the European Parliament extended the list of prohibited AI practices to include bans and discriminatory uses of AI, such as :

  • "Real-time " remote biometric identification systems in publicly accessible spaces ;
  • "Post" remote biometric identification systems, with the only exception of law enforcement for the prosecution of serious crimes and only after judicial authorization ;
  • Biometric categorization systems using sensitive characteristics (e.g gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship status, religion, political orientation) ;
  • Predictive policing systems (based on profiling, location, or past criminal behavior) ;
  • Emotion recognition systems in law enforcement, border management, the workplace, and educational institutions; and
  • Untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases (violating human rights and the right to privacy).

High-risk AI

The classification of high-risk applications will now include AI systems that create significant harm to people's health, safety, fundamental rights, or the environment, influence voters and the outcome of elections; as well as recommender systems used by social media platforms.

Obligations for general purpose AI

Providers of foundation models would have to assess the possible risks to health, safety, fundamental rights, the environment, democracy, and the rule of law of their AI system. They would need to mitigate such risks and register their models in the EU database before releasing them on the EU market.

Generative AI system (e.g. ChatGPT) would have to comply with transparency requirements, which includes disclosing that the content was AI generated, helping to distinguish deep-fake images from real ones and ensuring safeguards against generating illegal content. Furthermore, summaries of the copyright data used for the machine learning would need to be made publicly available.

Supporting innovation and protecting citizen's rights

To support innovation, the European Parliament added exemptions for research activities and AI components provided under open-source license. The AI act promotes regulatory sandboxes, which will allow public authorities to assess AI before it is deployed.

Furthermore, users would have the right to file complaints about AI systems and receive explanations of decisions based on high-risk AI systems that significantly impact their fundamental rights.

The role of the EU AI office will be reformed. Indeed, the latter will have the mission to monitor the implementation of the AI rulebook.

Conclusion

Negotiations on the final text with the European Parliament, the Council, and the Commission will start with the aim of reaching an agreement on a compromise version, possibly before the end of 2023. In the meantime, the European Union, the US Government and key stakeholders are preparing a code of conduct and a voluntary pact to anticipate the regulation of the use of AI.

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