202406270030 - AI Regulation

EU Imposes AI governance

The European Union’s parliament voted Wednesday to push forward draft legislation, called the AI Act, that is positioned to be the West’s first comprehensive set of AI regulations.
The draft rules include bans on real-time, remote biometric surveillance in public spaces and would prohibit harvesting surveillance footage or scraping the internet in developing facial-recognition databases. The parliament’s version also seeks a ban on so-called predictive policing systems, which analyze prior criminal behavior and other data and try to predict future illegal activity.
More broadly, the draft legislation aims to regulate how companies train AI models with large data sets. It would, in some cases, require companies to disclose when content is generated using AI.
Under the rules, companies would also need to design their AI models in a way that prevents them from creating illegal content, and they would be required to publish summaries of the copyrighted data used to train their models.
Current drafts of the bill would impose fines of up to 6% or 7% of a company’s global revenue in certain cases of noncompliance.
Tech companies and their lobbyists argue that any government-enforced rules should focus on specific AI applications—and not put too many restrictions on how AI is developed, as is being proposed in Europe. They say such an approach would impede innovation.