EU lawmakers want changes to AI Act to account for ChatGPT
A group of twelve lawmakers from the European Parliament, including the lead authors of AI Act Dragoș Tudorache and Brando Benifei, have written an open letter calling for updates to the draft law to regulate artificial intelligence (AI). They are advocating for the inclusion of overarching controls on chatbots like ChatGPT.
While the AI Act covers high-risk cases of AI, it was not written with generative AI tools like ChatGPT, which can masquerade as human intelligence and converse with children and adults, in mind. The lawmakers suggest that the law needs to include “preliminary rules for the development and deployment of powerful, general purpose AI systems that can be easily adapted to a multitude of purposes,” including controls on developers and users of generative AI.
The lawmakers are in agreement with a recent letter from the Future of Life Institute that called for President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission and President Joe Biden of the United States to convene a global summit on AI to agree on a preliminary set of governing principles for the development, control, and deployment of very powerful artificial intelligence.
ChatGPT was recently banned in countries such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and the Italian data protection authority (DPA) shut down ChatGPT in the country for allegedly having no controls to stop it from interacting with children. The European Data Protection Board will form a task force to coordinate the potential enforcement actions of other DPAs, after data privacy regulators in France, Germany, Ireland, and Spain each indicated they might consider similar action.
Various U.S. agencies have also expressed their preparedness to act against any form of bias or discrimination in artificial intelligence. Scrutiny of ChatGPT has reignited concerns about the General Data Protection Regulation stifling innovation in technology or the legislation being insufficiently flexible to keep up with technological advances.
