Explained | What is the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act and how does it plan to rein in tech like ChatGPT?
The HinduThe story so far: After intense last-minute negotiations in the past few weeks on how to bring general-purpose artificial intelligence systems like OpenAI’s popular new chatbot ChatGPT under the ambit of regulation, members of the European Parliament reached a preliminary deal this week on a new draft of the European Union’s ambitious Artificial Intelligence Act, first drafted two years ago. Many AI tools are essentially black boxes, meaning even those who design them cannot explain what goes on inside them to generate a particular output.Complex and unexplainable AI tools have already manifested in wrongful arrests due to AI-enabled facial recognition, discrimination and societal biases seeping into AI outputs, and most recently, in how chatbots based on large language models like Generative Pretrained Trasformer-3 and 4 can generate versatile, human-competitive and genuine looking content, which may be inaccurate and use copyrighted material created by others. Similar to how the EU’s 2018 General Data Protection Regulation made it an industry leader in the global data protection regime, the AI law aims to “strengthen Europe’s position as a global hub of excellence in AI from the lab to the market” and ensure that AI in Europe respects the 27-country bloc’s values and rules. The bloc’s 108-page proposal for the AI Act, published two years earlier, included only one mention of the word “chatbot.” By mid-April, however, members of the European Parliament were racing to update those rules to catch up with an explosion of interest in generative AI, which has provoked awe and anxiety since OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT six months ago.