On June 14, 2023, the European Parliament voted to approve the first draft of the new AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive law regulating artificial intelligence (“AI”). Although the law has not yet been passed and may be subject to further amendments, this marks a significant milestone in the European legislative process. The Act will now enter the last phase, in which the text will be finalized over the coming months before adoption as law.
What Will the Legislation Cover?
The European Parliament’s stated aim for the Act is to make sure that AI systems used in the EU are “safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory and environmentally friendly.” The European Parliament has said, “AI systems should be overseen by people, rather than by automation, to prevent harmful outcomes.”
The AI Act sets out a broad definition of AI, which would apply across all 27 European Member States and likely includes the regulation of both predictive AI (AI used to make future predictions or decisions) and generative AI (AI used to generate new outputs based upon the patterns within data on which they have been trained, such as ChatGPT). The technological scope covered is not, however, crystal clear. Machine learning (“ML”) techniques are squarely within this scope; the open question is whether a far broader swath of techniques and systems—Bayesian inferential models and other so-called “statistical approaches,” as well as so-called “logic- and knowledge-based approaches,” none of...
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