EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act

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Recently, members of the European Parliament have reached a preliminary deal on a
new draft of the European Union’s ambitious Artificial Intelligence Act.

Key Highlights:

• The EU’s AI Act aims to bring transparency, trust, and accountability to AI and create a framework to mitigate risks to the safety, health, fundamental rights, and democratic values of the EU.
• The act 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.
• The Act prohibits using AI technologies in the unacceptable risk category. These include the use of real-time facial and biometric identification systems in public spaces; systems of social scoring of citizens by governments; subliminal techniques to distort a person’s behaviour and technologies which can exploit vulnerabilities of the young or elderly.
• The Act also envisages establishing an EU-wide database of high-risk AI systems and setting parameters so that future technologies or those under development can be included if they meet the high-risk criteria.