The European Union (EU) continues to take steps to pass the first law in the world that will set standards for the use of artificial intelligence (AI). After months of internal debate, the two parliamentary committees responsible for drafting the regulation have passed the negotiation mandate this Thursday, a position that the European Parliament must vote on in mid-June and that sets a series of obligations for applications such as ChatGPT.
The legislative proposal of the MEPs establishes that the generative language models that use the famous conversational chatbot of Open AI either Bardthe alternative created by Google, they will have to comply with additional transparency requirements. That will force those big companies to disclose whether they use copyrighted material, point out what content has been created with AI, and design those systems so that they do not generate illegal content.
“Given the profound transformative impact that AI will have on our societies and economies, the AI Law is most likely the most important piece of legislation in this mandate. It is the first law of its kind in the world, which means that the EU can lead the way for AI to be human-centric, reliable and safe,” said Romanian MEP Dragos Tudoracheco-rapporteur of the text.
Classification according to risk
The mandate approved this Thursday aims to guarantee that the systems of AI are secure, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory and are supervised by people. That is why it classifies the uses of this technology on a risk scale. “The greater the risk that can entail, the firmer and stricter the norm will be,” explained the European vice president, Margrethe Vestageron April 21, 2021, when the European Comission put that pioneering regulation on the table for the first time.
In this way, European law is expected to prohibit uses of AI that pose an “unacceptable risk”, such as biometric surveillance, facial recognitionpredictive police systems, intentional manipulation or the categorization of people based on their social behavior, socioeconomic status or personal characteristics.
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In recent days, MEPs have expanded the uses of AI classified as “high risk” to add those that may “include damage to people’s health, safety, fundamental rights or the environment”, the systems that can influence citizens during electoral processes and the algorithms of recommendation of great social networks as TikTok, Facebook, Twitter either instagram.
The Internal Market commission and the Civil Liberties commission have approved this negotiating mandate with 84 votes in favour, 7 against and 12 abstentions. The work is not done yet. This position must be voted on in plenary session. europarliament which will be held between June 12 and 15. The position that the chamber finally approves will be the one that it will defend in its negotiation with the 27 governments of the community club, represented by the European Council. With all this, it is expected that Brussels green light to the law during this year, although it will take longer to enter into force.