Good news from the EU!
Reliable data protection is vital to a functioning democracy. European Union negotiators have clinched a deal on comprehensive artificial intelligence rules.
On Friday, the EU announced a world first for AI, surveillance, and GPAI.
The regulation paves the way for what could become 'the' global standard to classify risk, enforce transparency and financially penalise big tech companies for noncompliance.
Europe’s AI Act seeks to ensure that the technology’s exponential advances are accompanied by monitoring and oversight, and that its highest-risk uses are banned.
Tech companies that want to do business in the 27-nation bloc of 450 million consumers — the West’s single largest — would be compelled to disclose data and do rigorous testing, particularly for “high-risk” applications in products like self-driving cars and medical equipment.
High-impact foundation models with systemic risk will have to conduct model evaluations, assess and mitigate systemic risks, conduct adversarial testing, report to the European Commission on serious incidents, ensure cybersecurity and report on their energy efficiency.
Governments can only use real-time biometric surveillance in public spaces in cases of victims of certain crimes, prevention of genuine, present, or foreseeable threats, such as terrorist attacks, and searches for people suspected of the most serious crimes.
The agreement bans cognitive behavioural manipulation, the untargeted scrapping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage, social scoring and biometric categorisation systems to infer political, religious, philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation and race.
The legislation ultimately included restrictions for foundation models but gave broad exemptions to “open-source models,” which are developed using code that’s freely available for developers to alter for their own products and tools. The move could benefit open-source AI companies in Europe that lobbied against the law, including France’s Mistral and Germany’s Aleph Alpha, as well as Meta, which released the open-source model LLaMA.
Sources:
1. The Washington Post (by far the best in my view)
2. Reuters
3. London CITY AM
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