On 13 March the European Parliament voted and adopted the first legislative act in Europe regulating the use of AI. The main objective is to offer only safe products that comply with EU principles and the fundamental rights and freedoms of European citizens.
The European Commission envisages a new package of financial measures to stimulate investment and improvement in the development of reliable AI. These measures include privileged access to supercomputers, for the expansion of the use of AI to a large number of public and private users, enabling the development of various newly released applications with AI, etc.
Incentives will be provided through the "Horizon Europe" and "Digital Europe" programmes. Public and private investment will amount to up to €4 billion over the lifetime of the programmes (2021-2027). New initiatives will also be proposed under the EIC "Accelerator" and InvestEU programmes, which provide additional capital incentives for the public and private sectors in the field of AI.
In parallel with this, all artificial intelligence (AI) systems that pose an "unacceptable" risk to the rights of EU citizens will be prohibited.
The following will also be prohibited due to being "unnaceptable":
- Biometric categorisation systems using sensitive data to infer race, political opinion, trade union membership, religious or philosophical beliefs or sexual orientation;
- real-time remote biometric identification of persons in public places;
- extracting ("scraping") facial images from the internet or from surveillance cameras to create facial recognition databases;
- social rating systems, emotion recognition at work and school, etc.
Exceptions to these practices are also allowed where, for example, the prohibited systems are strictly necessary for law enforcement purposes (subject to strict safeguards regarding the protection of citizens' fundamental rights and freedoms).
Technically, the final text should also be formally adopted by the European Council. This is expected to happen by June 2024. As a next step, the Regulation will be enacted 20 days after its publication in the Official Journal of the EU. Organisations falling under the scope of the legislation, depending on the type of AI they develop or offer, will have between 6 and 36 months after enactment to bring their activities into compliance.
