European lawmakers on Wednesday gave approval to the world's first comprehensive rules governing AI. The legislation still needs to go through negotiations before a final version is passed later this year. On Wednesday, the AI Act gained strong backing from European Parliament members, with 499 votes in favor, 28 against, and 93 abstentions. - The act aims to ban high-risk AI applications and raise transparency requirements.
- AI is categorized into four risk levels, ranging from minimal to unacceptable.
What's banned: - Under the law, real-time facial recognition, emotion recognition systems, and "social scoring" systems would be banned.
- Companies like Clearview AI would be barred from scraping biometric data from social media to create databases.
- Predictive policing tools are also not allowed.
- While not banned outright, riskier applications like resume scanners and AI tech geared toward children would undergo extra scrutiny.
What about ChatGPT? - While initially not included, lawmakers later added provisions to cover generative AI models like ChatGPT and Bard.
- While the systems can continue operating, they have to abide by some transparency requirements.
- For example, the law requires thorough documentation of any copyrighted material used to train AI systems in generating human-like text, images, video, and music.
- This way, content creators can know if their blog posts, books, and more were used to train algorithms.
- It would require makers to establish safeguards to prevent AI systems from generating illegal content.
What's next: - Representatives from the European Parliament, European Commission, and Council of the European Union will now negotiate a final version of the law.
- Once passed, there will be a roughly two-year grace period. After that, EU member states would have the power to enforce the rules, like requiring companies to remove apps from the market if they're found in violation.
- Violations could lead to fines of up to 40M euros ($43.3M) or 7% of a company's global revenue.
- It's likely the rules will serve as a model for similar regulations worldwide.
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