The EU Artificial Intelligence Act

What does this mean for U.S. Companies?

I was going to provide a brief summary on the EU’s new AI Act and its impact on the US market, but after being inundated with summaries interpreting the legislation and purporting to know exactly how this would impact the US government’s own AI legislative agenda, I decided against it.

Instead, I’ve provided two insightful links that explain the EU AI Act and its practical impacts.

• MIT Technology Review: Five things you need to know about the EU’s new AI Act
• HAI, Stanford University: Analyzing the EU AI Act: What Works, What Needs Improvement

Some of you will be asking: what do I care about EU AI legislation?

Simple. The EU AI Act confirms some of the items that I’ve recently written about, that of Reponsible AI as a driving factor for AI initiatives. The EU AI Act imposes legally binding rules on transparency and ethics in any and all AI initiatives that are deployed in the EU. For example, it will be illegal to indiscriminately scrape images from the internet to create facial recognition database; AI-generated content will have to be labeled as such; the act also uses a “risk-based approach” in how AI is regulated: the more risky the use case e.g., lending, hiring, and education, the more oversight and restrictions to the AI models, and therefore the more transparency will be required in understanding how the model was built (where does the data used to train the model come from?) to avoid biases.

And, since tech companies are loathe to have to adhere to two different standards (look at GDPR), they’ll probably enact one set of transparency and ethical codes globally. Probably enact.

The other impact of the EU AI act is to spur the US Government to enact an AI regulatory framework of its own, instead of relying on an executive order that focuses on national security with limited scope, and hoping that tech companies “self-police” their AI efforts. If the recent chaos at OpenAI suggests anything, it is that the e/acc factions are winning, and that does not bode well for responsible AI. We’ll see.

One more thing: I have been invited to speak at the World AI Cannes Festival, the largest AI conference in Europe, this coming February. I’ll make sure to bring back some tidbits and insights from the conference, especially with regards to the real-world impact of the EU AI Act.

Happy Holidays.

Other EU AI Act Articles of Interest:

• Artificial Intelligence act: Council and Parliament strike a deal on the first rules for AI in the world
• Artificial Intelligence Act: deal on comprehensive rules for trustworthy AI
• NY Times: E.U. Agrees on Landmark Artificial Intelligence Rules ($)
• NY Times: Biden Issues Executive Order to Create A.I. Safeguards ($)
• Wall Street Journal: Sweeping Regulation of AI Advances in E.U. Deal ($)

Note: this blog post was written by a real human and does not contain content generated by ChatGPT or any other Generative-AI platform.