A European Parliament committee voted to strengthen the flagship legislative proposal as it heads toward passage, part of a yearslong effort by Brussels to draw up guardrails for artificial intelligence. Those efforts have taken on more urgency as the rapid advances of chatbots like ChatGPT highlight benefits the emerging technology can bring - and the new perils it poses.The AI Act, first proposed in 2021, will govern any product or service that uses an artificial intelligence system.
Negotiators beefed up the proposal by voting to ban predictive policing tools, which crunch data to forecast where crimes will happen and who will commit them. They also voted for a wide ban on remote facial recognition, save for a few law enforcement exceptions like preventing a specific terrorist threat. The technology scans passers-by and uses AI to match their faces to a database.
AI systems used in high risk categories like employment and education, which would affect the course of a person's life, face tough requirements such as being transparent with users and putting in place risk assessment and mitigation measures. One key addition is a requirement to thoroughly document any copyright material used to teach AI systems how to generate text, images, video or music that resembles human work. That would let content creators know if their blog posts, digital books, scientific articles or pop songs have been used to train algorithms that power systems like ChatGPT. Then they could decide whether their work has been copied and seek redress.The European Union isn't a big player in cutting-edge AI development.