EU lawmakers eye ambitious AI regulation

THE sudden popularity of ChatGPT and other AI tools is injecting urgency into Europe’s drive to regulate the sector, which this week gets rolling seriously with an ambitious text to be voted on by EU lawmakers.

The European Union aims to be the global pioneer in creating a comprehensive legal framework that would rein in possible online harm while still protecting innovation in the field of artificial intelligence.

The massive complexity of the systems, and their ability to produce text and images that at times mimic human output, is proving as fascinating as it is concerning.

Faced with the risk of AI being used to make dangerous content, manipulate opinion, conduct mass surveillance or other perils yet to emerge, even tech leaders such as Twitter boss Elon Musk have called for a pause in its development.

The burgeoning use of AI by the public and corporations is outstripping action by Brussels, which two years ago proposed initial draft legislation to tackle the issue.

EU member states only fixed their position in that process at the end of 2022 —just as ChatGPT was taking off.

Now MEPs will set out their own stance in a committee vote on Thursday, after which the parliament, the commission and the member states will begin what promises to be thorny negotiations to reach agreement on a revised draft law.

“I really hope that we can have the first meeting of the political negotiation before summer so that we can end it this year,” Commission Vice President Magrethe Vestager said.

One MEP, Dragos Tudorache, coreporter on the parliament’s position document stressed that “it’s a complex text and we added a new regime covering generative AI.”

Lawmakers are seeking to require AI companies to put in place protections against illegal content and to reveal what copyright-protected materials their systems are using to learn from.

Some experts believe that the risk posed by generative AI – of which ChatGPT and the image-producing systems DALL-E and Midjourney are the best known—don’t need to be addressed separately. AFP