• Lawmakers in the European Union have passed the Artificial Intelligence Act.
• The AI Act aims to, “protect fundamental rights, democracy, the rule of law and environmental sustainability from high-risk AI.”
• The draft for the AI Act was first outlined three years ago, and will take effect two years after it officially becomes a law.

Lawmakers and regulators often move at glacial pace when it comes to ever-evolving developments in the technology space. Case in point the AI Act, which was this week approved by members of the European Union (EU).

While it is the first region on the planet to have outlined a set of regulations regarding the development, rollout, implementation, and sustainability of artificial intelligence, the draft of the AI Act was first presented three years ago.

Added to this is the fact that it will still take a further 24 months for the provisions within the AI Act to come into effect after it is officially made a law. That said, prohibited applications of AI will be banned six months after this Act is made a law.

While quite a bit can happen within the generative AI (genAI) space in particular during that time, as we have already seen within the past 12 months, the newly passed Act aims to, “protect fundamental rights, democracy, the rule of law and environmental sustainability from high-risk AI, while boosting innovation and establishing Europe as a leader in the field. The regulation establishes obligations for AI based on its potential risks and level of impact.”

“The new rules ban certain AI applications that threaten citizens’ rights, including biometric categorisation systems based on sensitive characteristics and untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases. Emotion recognition in the workplace and schools, social scoring, predictive policing (when it is based solely on profiling a person or assessing their characteristics), and AI that manipulates human behaviour or exploits people’s vulnerabilities will also be forbidden,” the EU’s release on the matter explains.

What this means for generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude 3, and others remains to be seen, but given none of them are used in a potentially invasive way or utilised to infringe on privacy right now, they appear to be on the right side of this Act.

Still, the AI Act does take into account manipulated media and AI-generated content, noting that it must be clearly labelled as such.

“General-purpose AI (GPAI) systems, and the GPAI models they are based on, must meet certain transparency requirements, including compliance with EU copyright law and publishing detailed summaries of the content used for training. The more powerful GPAI models that could pose systemic risks will face additional requirements, including performing model evaluations, assessing and mitigating systemic risks, and reporting on incidents,” the European Parliament added.

It will be interesting to see whether other parts of the globe will now start rolling out regulations regarding AI on the back of the EU doing so, with the United States, in particular, needing to make strides in this area as many of the genAI platforms on the market these days coming out of the US.

[Image – Photo by Frederic Köberl on Unsplash]