On Wednesday, the European Union will attempt to come to a consensus on broad regulations governing artificial intelligence. This comes after months of challenging talks, especially on the oversight of ChatGPT and other generative AI apps.
The EU is moving quickly to pass the first comprehensive AI regulation in history because the issue became more urgent when the ChatGPT bot emerged last year and brought attention to the astounding advancements in AI.
With just a few simple user commands, ChatGPT amazed everyone by producing poems and essays in a matter of seconds.
AI proponents say the technology will benefit humanity, transforming everything from work to healthcare, but others worry about the risks it poses to society, fearing it could thrust the world into unprecedented chaos.
Brussels is bent on bringing big tech to heel with a powerful legal armoury to protect EU citizens’ rights, especially those covering privacy and data protection.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, first proposed an AI law in 2021 that would regulate systems based on the level of risk they posed. For example, the greater the risk to citizens’ rights or health, the greater the systems’ obligations.
The final legal wording was being negotiated; but, at the last minute, discussions were endangered by a heated controversy in recent weeks about how to regulate AI applications such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbot. The argument started in June.
Discussions between negotiators representing the European Parliament and EU member states got underway on Wednesday and were predicted to go into the evening.
Certain member states are concerned that excessive regulation may hinder innovation and diminish the likelihood of creating European AI behemoths to rival those in the US, such as OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and tech behemoths like Google and Meta.
Although there is no real deadline, senior EU figures have repeatedly said the bloc must finalise the law before the end of 2023.
