The European Union’s risk-based rulebook for artificial intelligence — aka the EU AI Act — has been years in the making. But expect to hear a lot more about the regulation in the coming months (and years) as key compliance deadlines kick in. Meanwhile, read on for an overview of the law and its aims.
So what is the EU trying to achieve? Dial back the clock to April 2021, when the Commission published the original proposal and lawmakers were framing it as a law to bolster the bloc’s ability to innovate in AI by fostering trust among citizens. The framework would ensure AI technologies remained “human-centered” while also giving businesses clear rules to work their machine learning magic, the EU suggested.
Increasing adoption of automation across industry and society certainly has the potential to supercharge productivity in various domains. But it also poses risks of fast-scaling harms if outputs are poor and/or where AI intersects with individual rights and fails to respect them.
The bloc’s goal for the AI Act is therefore to drive uptake of AI and grow a local AI ecosystem by setting conditions that are intended to shrink the risks that things could go horribly wrong. Lawmakers think that having guardrails in place will boost citizens’ trust in and uptake of AI.
This ecosystem-fostering-through-trust idea was fairly uncontroversial back in the early part of the decade, when the law was being discussed and drafted. Objections were raised in some quarters, though, that it was simply too early to be regulating AI and that European innovation and competitiveness could suffer.
Few would likely say it’s too early now, of course, given how the technology has exploded into mainstream consciousness thanks to the boom in generative AI tools. But there are still objections that the law sandbags the prospects of homegrown AI entrepreneurs, despite the inclusion of support measures like regulatory sandboxes.
Even so, the big debate for many lawmakers is now around how …