The EU agrees: artificial intelligence should be more strictly regulated. 29 cartoons that summarize a hellish week

In the future, stricter rules will apply to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the EU. Negotiators from the European Parliament and EU countries agreed on a corresponding law on Friday evening after long negotiations in Brussels.

According to the EU Parliament, this is the first AI law in the world. The European Commission proposed the law in April 2021. Accordingly, AI systems should be divided into different risk groups. The greater the potential hazards of an application, the higher the requirements must be. The hope is that the rules will be copied around the world.

However, recently the negotiations almost collapsed – over the issue of regulating so-called basic models. These are very powerful AI models trained on a broad set of data. They can form the basis for many other applications. These include GPT.

Germany, France and Italy had previously called for only specific applications of AI to be regulated, but not the basic technology itself. But the planned rules for facial recognition using AI, for example for national security purposes, also caused controversy.

Consent is considered a formality

The European Parliament and the states still need to agree to the now agreed project, but this is considered a formality.

Artificial intelligence generally refers to applications based on machine learning, where software searches large amounts of data for matches and draws conclusions from them. They are already used in many areas. For example, such programs can evaluate images from computer tomographs faster and with greater accuracy than humans. Self-driving cars also try to predict the behavior of other road users. And chatbots or automatic playlists from streaming services also work with AI. (sda/dpa)