Following the European Parliament greenlighting the landmark AI Act, artificial intelligence companies operating in Europe will have to respect transparency obligations, label AI-generated images, and more.
The Artificial Intelligence Act, which has evolved a lot since it was first proposed by the European Commission in 2021, was voted in overwhelmingly on 13 March. It was endorsed by Members of European Parliament with 523 votes in favour, 46 against, and 49 abstentions.
General-purpose AI such as ChatGPT, Bard or DALL-E will have to meet transparency requirements, such as complying with EU copyright law. They will also need to publish detailed summaries of the content used for training the AI tools. Images, audio and video content generated or manipulated by AI will need to be clearly labelled as such. Obligations for general-purpose AI will become applicable 12 months after the legislation’s entry into force.
Heavy tech lobbying
This will no doubt have an effect on Artificial Intelligence companies as well as businesses using their tools. Google, Microsoft, and Mistral AI have lobbied the EU throughout the legislative process with the latter opening a lobbying office in Brussels.
Civil Liberties Committee co-rapporteur Dragos Tudorache admitted that the law was “one of the… heaviest lobbied pieces of legislation, certainly in this mandate”. Watchdogs such as the Corporate Europe Observatory claim the legislation was watered down as a result of lobbying.
Another focus of the AI Act is citizens’ rights. As such, biometric categorization systems based on sensitive characteristics have been banned. The untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases has also been prohibited.
“However, much work lies ahead that goes beyond the AI Act itself. AI will push us to rethink the social contract at the heart of our democracies, our education models, labour markets, and the way we conduct warfare. The AI Act is a starting point for a new model of governance built around technology. We must now focus on putting this law into practice,”
Civil Liberties Committee co-rapporteur Dragos Tudorache.
The EU AI Act is the first legislation to cover this fast-developing technology. One can expect that it will also have an effect on regulations in other countries, and in time, it may prove to be historic.
