EU’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act Comes into Force Next Month
Source: GreekReporter.com
EU countries have endorsed a political deal reached in December which means Europe’s landmark rules on artificial intelligence (AI) will come into force next month, setting a potential global benchmark for a technology used in business and everyday life.
The European Union’s AI Act is reportedly more comprehensive than the US’s voluntary compliance approach while China’s approach aims to keep social stability and state control.
The vote by EU countries came two months after EU lawmakers backed the AI legislation drafted by the European Commission in 2021, following a number of key changes.
Concerns around AI contributing to misinformation, fake news and copyrighted material have grown around the world in recent months amid the increasing popularity of generative AI systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s chatbot Gemini.
“This landmark law, the first of its kind in the world, addresses a global technological challenge that also creates opportunities for our societies and economies,” Belgian digitisation minister Mathieu Michel said in a statement.
“With the AI Act, Europe emphasizes the importance of trust, transparency and accountability when dealing with new technologies while at the same time ensuring this fast-changing technology can flourish and boost European innovation,” he said.
What does the EU’s AI Act Mean?
The AI Act obliges strict transparency obligations on high-risk AI systems, with requirements for general-purpose AI models will be softer. It restricts governments’ use of real-time biometric surveillance in public spaces to cases of certain crimes, prevention of terrorist attacks and searches for people suspected of the most serious crimes.
The new legislation will carry its impact beyond the 27-country bloc, Patrick van Eecke at the law from Cooley told Reuters.
“The Act will have global reach. Companies outside the EU who use EU customer data in their AI platforms will need to comply. Other countries and regions are likely to use the AI Act as a blueprint, just as they did with the GDPR,” he said, referring to EU privacy rules.
The new legislation will apply in 2026, but bans on the use of AI in social scoring, predictive policing and untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage will kick in in six months once the new regulation comes into force.
Rules for general purpose AI models will come into force after 12 months and obligations for AI systems embedded into regulated products in 36 months. Fines for violations range from 7.5 million euros ($8.2 million) or 1.5 percent of turnover, to 35 million euros or 7 percent of global turnover depending on the type of violation.
The BBC recently reported on the high energy demands of generative AI, with Sasha Luccioni at Hugging Face, a machine-learning company, telling the news outlet “every time you query the model, the whole thing gets activated, so it’s wildly inefficient from a computational perspective”.
The original article: GreekReporter.com .
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