European Union Slap Down Rules Governing AI

AI technology is moving like Superman, faster than a speeding bullet, which makes many of us nervous. After all, we've seen the Terminator movies or at least heard the Skynet jokes, right?


Governments are taking it all seriously. On Friday, the European Union (EU) agreed to some substantial and history-making rules to govern artificial intelligence. These regulations will undoubtedly become the first extensive regulations aimed at controlling AI.

Last week, major EU institutions looked at numerous proposals as they worked toward finding some middle ground. Some bones of contention included regulating generative AI (used to create tools like ChatGPT) and using biometric identification tools.

Not everybody was on the same page.

Germany, France, and Italy oppose regulating generative AI models in favor of letting the companies that design and build them do it, with the guidance of some handy government codes of conduct.

Their primary concern is that too much regulation could inhibit Europe's ability to keep up with American and Chinese tech. After all, Germany and France boast some of Europe's hottest AI startups, including DeepL and Mistral AI.

The EU AI Act is the first to "target AI" following several years of "European efforts to regulate the technology." The law goes back to 2021, when the European Commission proposed a common regulatory and legal framework for AI.

That law separates AI into risk categories from "unacceptable," meaning it isn't going to be allowed, to high, medium, and low risk.

Generative AI became a hot issue after the public release of OpenAI's ChatGPT.

ChatGPT, along with other generative AI like Google's Bard and Anthropic's Claude caught everybody by surprise, suggesting it was time to rethink regulations. After all, these generative models were now capable of, well, "generating" content that was too human-like. Some of the concerns regarding this kind of AI include the use of discriminative language, loss of human jobs, and possible privacy invasion issues.

As the battle for AI supremacy rages among major companies, governments worldwide are trying to figure out how to prevent Skynet from becoming a reality.

Stay tuned to find out who wins.

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