2023-06-30 15:07:40
More than 150 major companies warned that the European plan to regulate artificial intelligence risked harming the EU’s competitiveness, in particular compared to the United States, in a letter consulted on Friday by AFP.
The European Union hopes to conclude before the end of the year the first regulation in the world aimed at framing innovation in artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that is both full of promise and carries risks.
On June 14, MEPs approved a draft text which must now be negotiated with the Member States.
“In our view, the draft legislation would jeopardize Europe’s competitiveness and technological sovereignty without effectively tackling the challenges we are and will be facing,” said the leaders of companies such as Meta, Airbus, Peugeot , Renault and Siemens, in an open letter addressed to the EU institutions.
According to them, with the current draft text, generative AI “would be heavily regulated” and this might encourage “very innovative companies” to transfer their activities abroad and investors to disengage from the development of European AI. . “The result would be a critical productivity gap between the two sides of the Atlantic,” they argued.
The heart of the project consists of a list of rules imposed only on applications deemed to be “high risk”. These would be systems used in sensitive areas such as critical infrastructure, education, human resources, law enforcement or migration management.
Among the obligations: provide for human control over the machine, the establishment of technical documentation, or even the establishment of a risk management system.
Romanian MEP Dragos Tudorache, co-rapporteur on the draft legislation, said he was “convinced” that the business leaders who signed the letter had “not read the text carefully”. “It is unfortunate that the aggressive lobby of a handful of people is catching serious companies in its nets,” he reacted.
Of great technical complexity, artificial intelligence systems fascinate as much as they worry. While they can save lives by enabling a quantum leap in medical diagnosis, they are also exploited by authoritarian regimes to exercise mass surveillance of citizens.
The dissemination on social networks of false images, more real than life, created from applications like Midjourney, has alerted to the risks of manipulation of opinion and the dangers for democracy. Scientists have called for a moratorium on the development of the most powerful AI systems.
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