The European intelligence regulation project artificial it approved a crucial step on Thursday by getting a first green light from MEPs who called for new bans and better consideration of the ChatGPT phenomenon.
The European Union wants to be the first in the world to adopt a comprehensive legal framework to limit intelligence abuse artificial (AI), while ensuring innovation.
Brussels proposed an ambitious draft regulation two years ago, but its examination is dragging on, delayed in recent months by controversies over the dangers of generative AI capable of creating text or images. The EU member states only defined their position at the end of 2022.
“An ethical approach based on the human being”
MEPs approved theirs in a committee vote on Thursday morning in Strasbourg, which must be confirmed at the June plenary session. Then a difficult negotiation will begin between the different institutions.
“Europe wants an ethical approach, based on people”, summarized Brando Benifei, also a co-speaker.
Intelligence systems of high technical complexity artificial They fascinate as much as they worry.
While they can save lives by enabling a quantum leap in medical diagnosis, they are also exploited by authoritarian regimes for mass surveillance of citizens.
The general public discovered its immense potential late last year with the launch of California-based OpenAI’s editorial content generator ChatGPT, which can write original essays, poems or translations in seconds.
But the dissemination on social networks of false images, more real than life, created from applications such as Midjourney, alerted to the risks of opinion manipulation.
Scientific personalities have even called for a moratorium on the development of the most powerful systems, until they are better regulated by law.
Parliament’s position broadly confirms the Commission’s approach. The text builds on existing rules on product safety and will impose mainly company-based controls.
The human being must be in control.
The heart of the project consists of a list of rules imposed only on applications considered “high risk” by the companies themselves at the discretion of the legislator. For the European executive, it would be all systems used in sensitive areas such as critical infrastructure, education, human resources, law enforcement or migration management…
Among the obligations: provide for human control over the machine, the establishment of technical documentation, or even the establishment of a risk management system.
Its compliance will be monitored by the supervisory authorities designated in each member country.
MEPs want to limit the obligations to only products that may threaten safety, health or fundamental rights.
The European Parliament also intends to take better account of generative AIs of the ChatGPT type by requesting a specific regime of obligations that essentially repeats those provided for high-risk systems.
MEPs also want to force providers to implement protections against illegal content and to disclose the data (scientific texts, music, photos, etc.) protected by copyright and used to develop their algorithms.
emotion recognition
The Commission proposal, presented in April 2021, already provides a framework for AI systems that interact with humans. It will force them to inform the user that they are in contact with a machine, and it will force imaging applications to specify that they were artificially created.
Bans will be rare. They will refer to applications contrary to European values, such as citizen rating systems or mass surveillance used in China.
MEPs want to ban emotion recognition systems and remove exceptions allowing remote biometric identification of people in public places by law enforcement.
They also intend to prohibit the mass collection of photos on the Internet to train algorithms without the consent of the people involved.
Source: BFM TV
