European Artificial Intelligence Act Comes Into Force

The European Artificial Intelligence Act, the world’s first comprehensive regulation on artificial intelligence, has entered into force.

The European Commission says the new rule, known in short form as AI Act, is designed to ensure that artificial intelligence is developed and used in the EU is trustworthy, with safeguards to protect people’s fundamental rights.

The regulation aims to establish a harmonized internal market for AI in the EU, encouraging the uptake of this technology and creating a supportive environment for innovation and investment.

The AI Act introduces a forward-looking definition of AI, based on a product safety and risk-based approach in the EU.

Most AI systems, such as AI-enabled recommender systems and spam filters, fall into the Minimal risk category. These systems face no obligations under the AI Act due to their minimal risk to citizens’ rights and safety. Companies can voluntarily adopt additional codes of conduct.

AI systems like chatbots must clearly disclose to users that they are interacting with a machine. Certain AI-generated content, including deep fakes, must be labelled as Specific transparency risk, and users need to be informed when biometric categorisation or emotion recognition systems are being used. In addition, providers will have to design systems in a way that synthetic audio, video, text and images content is marked in a machine-readable format, and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated.

AI systems identified as high-risk will be required to comply with strict requirements, including risk-mitigation systems, high quality of data sets, logging of activity, detailed documentation, clear user information, human oversight, and a high level of robustness, accuracy, and cyber security.

AI systems considered a clear threat to the fundamental rights of people will be banned. Categorized under Unacceptable risk, this includes AI systems or applications that manipulate human behavior to circumvent users’ free will, such as toys using voice assistance encouraging dangerous behavior of minors, systems that allow ‘social scoring’ by governments or companies, and certain applications of predictive policing.

Member States are required to designate national competent authorities within one year to oversee the application of the rules for AI systems and carry out market surveillance activities. The Commission’s AI Office will be the key implementation body for the AI Act at EU-level.

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