philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Five big takeaways from Europe’s AI Act

... Some applications of AI will be banned entirely if lawmakers consider the risk “unacceptable,” while technologies deemed “high risk” will have new limitations on their use and requirements around transparency. 

Here are some of the major implications:

1. Ban on emotion-recognition AI. The European Parliament’s draft text bans the use of AI that attempts to recognize people’s emotions in policing, schools, and workplaces. Makers of emotion-recognition software claim that AI is able to determine when a student is not understanding certain material, or when a driver of a car might be falling asleep. The use of AI to conduct facial detection and analysis has been criticized for inaccuracy and bias, but it has not been banned in the draft text from the other two institutions, suggesting there’s a political fight to come.
2. Ban on real-time biometrics and predictive policing in public spaces. This will be a major legislative battle, because the various EU bodies will have to sort out whether, and how, the ban is enforced in law. Policing groups are not in favor of a ban on real-time biometric technologies, which they say are necessary for modern policing. Some countries, like France, are actually planning to increase their use of facial recognition. 
3. Ban on social scoring. Social scoring by public agencies, or the practice of using data about people's social behavior to make generalizations and profiles, would be outlawed. That said, the outlook on social scoring, commonly associated with China and other authoritarian governments, isn’t really as simple as it may seem. The practice of using social behavior data to evaluate people is common in doling out mortgages and setting insurance rates, as well as in hiring and advertising. 
4. New restrictions for gen AI. This draft is the first to propose ways to regulate generative AI, and ban the use of any copyrighted material in the training set of large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4. OpenAI has already come under the scrutiny of European lawmakers for concerns about data privacy and copyright. The draft bill also requires that AI generated content be labeled as such. That said, the European Parliament now has to sell its policy to the European Commission and individual countries, which are likely to face lobbying pressure from the tech industry.
5. New restrictions on recommendation algorithms on social media. The new draft assigns recommender systems to a “high risk” category, which is an escalation from the other proposed bills. This means that if it passes, recommender systems on social media platforms will be subject to much more scrutiny about how they work, and tech companies could be more liable for the impact of user-generated content.

The risks of AI as described by Margrethe Vestager, executive vice president of the EU Commission, are widespread. She has emphasized concerns about the future of trust in information, vulnerability to social manipulation by bad actors, and mass surveillance. 

“If we end up in a situation where we believe nothing, then we have undermined our society completely,” Vestager told reporters on Wednesday.

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/19/1075063/five-big-takeaways-from-europes-ai-act/?truid=33b587ecf0755237a213721d72ba90e8&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=Active%20Qualified&utm_content=06-19-2023&mc_cid=43d8c61705&mc_eid=cf24d7da5b