Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The AI Act is finally here and big changes are on the way. Here are the key details of the Act and the tips businesses should heed before its full arrival.
The EU’s AI Act – its landmark regulation to rein in the growing power of artificial intelligence – has officially entered into force today (1 August), heralding big changes for Big Tech.
The Act has been in development for years, being first discussed in 2021 and altered in recent years with the sudden rise of generative AI technology. The Act has also been put under heavy scrutiny – challenges from member states towards the end of 2023 made it seem like the Act could collapse before coming to fruition.
But after delays, adjustments and multiple landslide votes, the AI Act is finally here. The changes won’t be felt immediately – it will be years until all of the rules come into effect – but this will give businesses and member states time to prepare for the Act’s full arrival.
Simply put, the AI Act is an attempt to balance managing the risks of this technology while letting the EU benefit from its potential. It has been argued that this is the most robust and detailed form of AI regulation in the world, which could influence legislation in other parts of the world.
The Act is designed to regulate AI technology through a risk-based approach – the riskier an AI application is, the more rules that apply to it. Minimum risk systems such as spam filters and recommender systems do not face any obligations under the AI Act.
Meanwhile, high-risk applications such as AI systems used for recruitment, AI-based loan assessments or autonomous robots will face much stricter requirements, including human oversight, high-quality data sets and cybersecurity. Some systems are banned entirely, such as emotion recognition systems used at the workplace.
The AI Act also introduces rules for “general-purpose AI models”, which are highly capable AI models that are designed to perform a wide variety of tasks such as generating human-like text – think ChatGPT and similar chatbots.
The AI Act won’t be felt until six months, when prohibitions will apply against unacceptable-risk AI applications. The rules for general-purpose AI models will apply one year from now, while the majority of rules of the AI Act will start applying on 2 August 2026.
Meanwhile, EU member states have until 2 August 2025 to designate “national competent authorities”, which will oversee the application of the AI Act and carry out market surveillance activities.
With AI making its way into so many use cases, it will be important for businesses of all sizes to consider the type of AI systems they are using and where they fall into the AI Act’s risk tiers. Phil Burr, head of product at Lumai, said the biggest risk businesses face is ignoring the Act.
“The good news is that the Act takes a risk-based approach and, given that the vast majority of AI will be minimal or low-risk, the requirements on businesses using AI will be relatively small,” Burr said. “It’s likely to be far less than the effort required to implement the GDPR regulations, for example.
“The biggest problem for compliance is the need to document and then perform regular assessments to ensure that the AI risks – and therefore requirements – haven’t changed. For the majority of businesses there won’t be a change in risk, but business at least need to remember to perform these.”
While businesses have plenty of time to prepare, the road ahead is not clear for them. Forrester principal analyst Enza Iannopollo noted that firms don’t have any pre-existing experience of complying with these type of rules, which adds “complexity to the challenge”.
“Right now, it’s crucial that organisations ensure they understand what theirs and their providers’ obligations are in order to be compliant on time,” Iannopollo said. “This is the time for organisations to map their AI projects, classify their AI systems and risk assess their use-cases.
“They also need to execute a compliance roadmap that is specific to the amount and combination of use-cases they have. Once this work is done, every company will have a compliance roadmap that is unique to them.”
To bridge the period between now and the full implementation of the Act, the European Commission has launched the ‘AI Pact’, which is initiative for AI developers to voluntarily adopt key obligations of the Act ahead of its legal deadlines.
The EU has been introducing stronger penalties for breaches in its more recent legislation, with the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act carrying heavy fines for non-compliance.
The AI Act is no exception to this approach, as companies that breach the Act could face fines of up to 7pc of their global annual turnover for violations of banned AI applications. They will also face fines of up to 3pc for violations of other obligations and up to 1.5pc for supplying incorrect information.
[...] “For reference, GDPR caps maximum fines to 4pc of annual turnover, whereas EU competition law caps this at 10pc,” Koskinen said. “This comparison shows a clear movement in regulatory enforcement for the AI Act, as the maximum fines inch closer to those imposed on anticompetitive behaviour.
“As businesses around the world look to Europe, the AI Act’s requirements will lead the way in responsible AI innovation and governance, while ensuring organisations are prepared for its rapidly approaching enforcement.”
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Friday August 02 2024, @09:42PM (1 child)
Typical euros
"We don't know what you need to do, and you don't know what you need to do, but if we arbitrarily don't like you, we will fine you up to one zillion dollars, because we can"
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday August 03 2024, @02:14PM
Well, it is the EU. If there is one thing they absolutely despise it is ambition, productivity and success (especially of the financial kind).
Hence any mildly productive individual, business or industry is regulated and taxed to the threshold of collapse, which drives most of them out of the EU.
Then they wonder why they are always stagnating compared to the rest of the world, and why other places (like the USA) seem to be more inventive, dynamic and prosperous.
I will admit that if you are the kind of individual who doesn't want to work much and has little ambition/drive to be productive, it is a good place to live. The social security net and benefits are generous, and you can live a modest but good quality of life with little effort on your part. Hence why it is a popular target for migration.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday August 02 2024, @09:48PM
For some time now I've been feeling that the EU produces better quality legislation than the US does. Perhaps the EU's greater diversity is why. Or perhaps the EU dreams of pulling ahead of the US technologically. WWII fundamentally changed EU society, for the better.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2024, @12:18AM (1 child)
I did some analytics last year across ~2 million patient records and around 12 million appointments.
The patient dataset contained the street-part of the address, city, state, zipcode, gender, insurance, marital status and employed (y/n).
Matched up with that was the date/time an appointment was *made* and the date/time an appointment was set for, if it was made via phone call, email, chat, or webform submission, and if they showed up, cancelled, no-showed, re-scheduled, or re-scheduled with less than an hours notice. The last field was a very generalized field for the type of appointment (i.e. checkup, emergency/pain, follow-up, benefit use, etc...)
We trained it to identify which appointments were most likely to be cancelled or no-showed in order to allow offices to overbook and not lose revenue.
Then we spent a few months testing it against live data to verify how accurate it was....and it worked pretty damned well.
We showed the results to the client and they cancelled the whole damned project. Why?
Well...the person most likely to skip an appointment is a jobless single mom from section 8 housing making an appointment for their kid with insurance covered by stealing from productive members of society who actually have jobs.
None of that's very PC. You also don't need AI to tell you that. Just look at the name, employment status, and insurance provider field.
Looking at graphs for a few combinations of fields showed similar results:
Forcing everyone to pay for your insurance is a fairly strong indicator you'll no-show an appointment, but less so if you're a man for some reason.
Being unemployed pretty much goes hand-in-hand with having taxpayers pay for your insurance, so it's also a strong indicator.
Being in pain was a strong indicator you would keep your appointment, but also being a single father scheduling your child....probably because mom will take you back to court to further fuck you over if you miss it.
There was also a strange increase in re-scheduling appointments with short notice for addresses in "wealthy" addresses. Possibly productive people with jobs having to work late or deal with emergencies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 04 2024, @02:24PM
See...this is why the customer shut the project down.
Offtopic=1, Troll=1, Interesting=1, Total=3
Morons hate it when data reveals things that don't "feel" good...and there are a lot of shitty point-and-click admins out there.