EU agrees on landmark law to more closely regulate AI
Dec 10, 2023
Brussels [Belgium], December 10: Stricter rules will apply to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the European Union in future, as negotiators from the European Parliament and EU member states agreed on a new law on Friday night after lengthy negotiations.
The European Parliament described it as the world's first AI law. AI usually refers to applications based on machine learning, in which software searches through large amounts of data for matches and draws conclusions from them. They are already being used in many areas, such as evaluating computer tomography images faster with greater accuracy than humans, self-driving cars and chatbots.
The European Commission proposed the law in April 2021. According to this, AI systems are to be categorized into different risk groups.
The higher the potential risks of an application, the higher the requirements should be. The hope was that the rules would be copied worldwide.
However, negotiations almost broke down recently over the issue of regulating so-called basic models. These are very powerful AI models that have been trained with a broad set of data. They can form the basis for many other applications, such as Generative Pre-trained Transformers. Germany, France and Italy had previously called for only specific applications of AI to be regulated, but not the basic technology itself. However, the planned rules on facial recognition using AI, for example for national security purposes, also caused controversy.
The European Parliament and the states still have to officially approve the new agreement, but this is now considered a formality.
Source: Qatar Tribune
