Today, the Internal Market Committee and the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Union adopted a draft negotiating mandate on the first ever rules for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ensure its human-centric and ethical development in Europe.
In the amendments to the proposal presented by the European Commission, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) aimed to ensure that AI systems are overseen by people, safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory, and environmentally friendly. The new rules for AI would follow a risk-based approach and establish obligations for providers and users depending on the risk level the AI can generate. Any AI system with an unacceptable risk level to people’s safety would be strictly prohibited, including systems that deploy subliminal or purposefully manipulative techniques, exploit people’s vulnerabilities or are used for social scoring such as classifying people based on their social behavior, socio-economic status, or personal characteristics.
The following intrusive and discriminatory uses of AI systems are to be banned:
- 'Real-time' remote biometric identification and facial recognition systems in public spaces;
- 'Post' remote biometric identification systems, with the only exception of law enforcement for the prosecution of serious crimes and only after judicial authorization;
- Biometric categorization systems using sensitive characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship status, religion, political orientation;
- Predictive policing systems based on profiling, location or past criminal behavior;
- Emotion recognition systems in law enforcement, border management, workplace, and educational institutions; and
- Indiscriminate scraping of biometric data from social media or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases as this is violating human rights and right to privacy.
MEPs expanded the classification of high-risk areas to include harm to people’s health, safety, fundamental rights, or the environment and considered AI systems to be high-risk that influence voters in political campaigns and in recommender systems used by social media platforms with more than 45 million users under the Digital Services Act.
Ursula Pachl, Deputy Director General at the European Consumer Organization BEUC, commented: "With the explosion of ChatGPT and a daily stream of news about the latest AI systems, it is clear we are only at the beginning of the AI age. Although AI may improve our lives in many ways, there are well-founded concerns that AI systems can also harm consumers. People must be properly protected against the risks of these new technologies. The outcome of today’s vote means that the European Parliament is determined to improve consumer protection and respect the fundamental rights of users of AI systems. We are however very worried that AI operators could circumvent the rules of the AI Act by simply saying their services are not high risk. Also, the proposed basic principles for 'trustworthy AI' which importantly would apply to all AI are only voluntary for businesses or public entities, when they should be obligatory."
Source: EP & BEUC
More information and BEUC press release