Last Update: May 09, 2023, 02:50 AM IST
Experts believe that AI can very soon match humans. (Representational image/Reuters)
European Commission to put forward regulatory proposals in early 2021, but progress on legislation has been slow
The European Union needs to speed up work on artificial intelligence (AI) regulation, Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager said on Monday, as policymakers grapple with the risks from the emerging technology.
“There is no time to waste” on passing regulations to govern the use of AI, Vestager told reporters in Berlin.
The European Commission put forward regulatory proposals in early 2021, but progress on the legislation has been slow.
EU member states will lay down their views on the Commission’s views in late 2022, while MEPs will put the matter to a preliminary vote in committee in Strasbourg on Thursday.
Parliament’s opinion must be confirmed in a plenary vote in June before negotiations between EU institutions can begin in earnest.
“I think what’s important is speed. We really need our own legislation,” Vestager said.
“I really hope that we can have the first meeting of political talks before the summer so that we can finish it this year.”
The advent of new AI tools such as ChatGPT has reignited the debate on regulation and encouraged governments to respond.
ChatGPT can generate essays, poems and conversations from the briefest of prompts, and has proven itself capable of passing some of the toughest tests.
But it has been dogged by concerns that its capabilities could lead to widespread cheating in schools or supercharged disinformation on the Web.
The chatbot can only function when it is trained on huge datasets, raising concerns about where its creator OpenAI gets its data and how that information is handled.
Italy temporarily banned the program in March because its data-gathering broke privacy laws, while French and German regulators launched their own investigations.
“When it comes to artificial intelligence like ChatGPT it will also be caught by the (EU’s) AI Act,” Vestager said.
Vestager said the proposed legislation is “future-proof” because it targets the use of AI, not the specific technologies behind it.
The EU draft outlaws some uses such as “generalised surveillance”, while companies must authorize themselves for other “high-risk” uses such as facial recognition.
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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)
