The EU is finally passed The Artificial Intelligence Act, which she has been working on for the past few years. The EU AI Law is a comprehensive piece of legislation that takes a risk-based approach to the regulation of AI.
“The adoption of the Artificial Intelligence Act marks the beginning of a new era of artificial intelligence and its importance cannot be overstated,” he said. Enza Iannopollo, principal analyst at Forrester. “The EU AI Act is the world’s first and only set of binding requirements to mitigate AI risks.”
The new law will rank AI based on potential risks and use that level of risk to determine how much regulation is needed.
In the upcoming episode SD Times podcast, Duane Pozza, who is a former assistant director of the FTC and now an AI attorney at Wiley Rein LLP, says the following: “What’s interesting here is that it focuses in large part on what he calls high-risk AI. So there are a lot of requirements, especially around security investments and controls, that will apply when AI is used for a whole category of higher-risk use cases … really putting guardrails in those areas and then a lighter touch … with AI that they could use for other purposes that are kind of on the lower risk spectrum.”
The EU considers the following uses to be high-risk: critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment, basic services, certain law enforcement systems, migration and border management, and justice and democratic processes. The use of artificial intelligence in these systems will require steps to be taken to mitigate risk, such as maintaining usage logs, providing transparency into the systems, and human oversight.
According to the EU, citizens can also file formal complaints about artificial intelligence systems if they feel they affect their rights.
General purpose AI models will also be subject to transparency requirements and comply with EU copyright law. The creators of those models will have to publish detailed summaries of the data they used to train those models. Deepfake images, audio and video will also need to be clearly labeled so people know they’ve been altered by AI.
“The goal is to enable institutions to take full advantage of artificial intelligence in a safer, more reliable and more inclusive way,” Iannopollo said. “Like it or not, with this regulation the EU establishes a ‘de facto’ standard for reliable AI, AI risk reduction and responsible AI. Every other region can only play catch-up.”
Iannopollo recommends companies start organizing their AI compliance teams now to be ready to meet the requirements. She said compliance with the regulation “will require strong collaboration across teams, from IT and data science to legal and risk management, and close support from the C-suite.”
“The EU has succeeded,” said Dragos Tudorache, member of the European Parliament and co-rapporteur of the Committee on Civil Liberties. “We have connected the concept of artificial intelligence with the fundamental values that form the foundation of our societies. However, there is much work ahead that goes beyond the AI Act itself. Artificial intelligence will prompt us to rethink the social contract at the heart of our democracies, our educational models, our labor markets, and the way we wage war. The Law on Artificial Intelligence is the starting point for a new governance model built around technology. We must now focus on putting this law into practice.”