EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act 'Regulating Artificial intelligence'

ChatGPT

Q. Why artificial intelligence should be regulated?

·   As artificial intelligence technologies become omnipresent and their algorithms more advanced—capable of performing a wide variety of tasks including voice assistance, recommending music, driving cars, detecting cancer, and even deciding whether you get shortlisted for a job— the risks and uncertainties associated with them have also ballooned.

·     Many AI tools are essentially black boxes, meaning even those who design them cannot explain what goes on inside them to generate a particular output.Complex and unexplainable AI tools have already manifested in wrongful arrests due to AI-enabled facial recognition, discrimination and societal biases seeping into AI outputs, and most recently, in how chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) like Generative Pretrained Trasformer-3 (GPT-3) and 4 can generate versatile, human-competitive and genuine looking content, which may be inaccurate and use copyrighted material created by others.

Q. What is the aim of this act?

·  The legislation was drafted in 2021 with the aim of bringing transparency, trust, and accountability to AIand creating a framework to mitigate risks to the safety, health, fundamental rights, and democratic values of the EU.

·  It also aims to address ethical questions and implementation challenges in various sectors ranging from healthcare and education to finance and energy. The legislation seeks to strike a balance between promoting “the uptake of AI while mitigating or preventing harms associated with certain uses of the technology”.

·      AI law aims to “strengthen Europe’s position as a global hub of excellence in AI from the lab to the market” and ensure that AI in Europe respects the 27-country bloc’s values and rules. What does the Artificial Intelligence Act entail?

Q. What is the definition of AI in this act ?

·  The Act broadly defines AI as “software that is developed with one or more of the techniques that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, generate outputs such as content, predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing the environments they interact with”. Under the definition, it identifies AI tools based on machine learning and deep learning, knowledge and logic-based approaches and statistical approaches.

Q. What is the Classification of AI in this act ?

·    The Act’s central approach is the classification of AI tech based on the level of risk they pose to the “health and safety or fundamental rights” of a person. There are four risk categories in the Act— unacceptable, high, limited and minimal.

· The Act prohibits using technologies in the unacceptable risk category with little exception. These include the use of real-time facial and biometric identification systems in public spaces; China-like systems of social scoring of citizens by governments leading to “unjustified and disproportionate detrimental treatment”; subliminal techniques to distort a person’s behaviour; and technologies which can exploit vulnerabilities of the young or elderly, or persons with disabilities.

Q. What are the focus areas in this act ?

·   The Act lays substantial focus on AI in the high-risk category, prescribing a number of pre-and post-market requirements for developers and users of such systems. Some systems falling under this category include biometric identification and categorization of natural persons, AI used in healthcare, education, employment (recruitment), law enforcement, justice delivery systems, and tools that provide access to essential private and public services (including access to financial services such as loan approval systems).

Q. What is the recent proposal on General Purpose AI like ChatGPT?

·   Lawmakers now target the use of copyrighted material by companies deploying generative AI tools such as OpenAI’sChatGPT or image generator Midjourney, as these tools train themselves from large sets of text and visual data on the internet. They will have to disclose any copyrighted material used to develop their systems. 

Q. Where does global AI governance currently stand?

·  The U.S.does not currently have comprehensive AI regulation and has taken a fairly hands-off approach. The Biden administration released a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights (AIBoR). Developed by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the AIBoR outlines a harms of AI to economic and civil rights and lays down five principles for mitigating these harms. The AIBoR has been described by the administration as a guidance or a handbook rather than a binding legislation.

·    On the other end of the spectrum, China over the last year came out with some of the world’s first nationally binding regulations targeting specific types of algorithms and AI. It enacted a law to regulate recommendation algorithms with a focus on how they disseminate information. China’s Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), which drafted the rules, told companies to “promote positive energy”, to not “endanger national security or the social public interest” and to “give an explanation” when they harm the legitimate interests of users.Another piece of legislation targets deep synthesis technology used to generate deepfakes.