The European Parliament has adopted its negotiating position on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, ahead of talks with Council on the final law. The rules would ensure that AI developed and used in Europe is fully in line with EU rights and values, including human oversight, safety, privacy, transparency, non-discrimination and social and environmental wellbeing. The position sets out a risk-based approach and establishes obligations for providers and those deploying AI systems. Where there would be unacceptable level of risk to people’s safety, the use of AI systems would be prohibited, such as those used for social scoring (classifying people based on their social behaviour or personal characteristics).
MEPs expanded the list to include bans on intrusive and discriminatory uses of AI, including:
• Real-time remote biometric identification systems in publicly accessible spaces
• Biometric categorisation systems using sensitive characteristics (e.g. gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship status, religion, political orientation)
• Emotion recognition systems in law enforcement, border management, the workplace, and educational institutions
• Untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases.
The position also stipulates that high-risk applications include AI systems that pose significant harm to people’s health, safety, fundamental rights or the environment. Additionally, AI systems used to influence voters and the outcome of elections and recommender systems used by social media platforms (with over 45 million users) were added to the high-risk list.
The full position can be read at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2023-0236_EN.html
