European Union To Start Moderating AI Generators With New Laws This Year
Photo 242843461 © Golubovy | Dreamstime.com
As promising as the advances of artificial intelligence are, there are several reasons many people—creators included—are wary of them. AI continues to occupy unregulated territory, giving rise to problems like criminal impersonations, the proliferation of gender and racial bias, disinformation, non-consensual sexual imagery, and copyright uncertainties.
Soon, though, a new sheriff might step into this Wild Wild West. Noting the growing pains that have come with the almost-overnight spawn of AI generators, the European Union (EU) is looking into rolling out legislation to regulate emerging tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, ChatGPT, and Stable Diffusion this year.
According to a report by MIT Technology Review, the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act will be the first-ever set of laws pertaining to AI by a major regulatory body. Developers of text-to-art generators and the ilk have been extremely guarded with the inner workings of their technology, and the legislation will finally put pressure on them to be transparent and take accountability for side effects they may have been less motivated about fixing.
With how the technology works being out in the open, observers and industry insiders may eventually come up with strategies to tackle AI’s innate bias and more insidious effects.
The EU is calling generative AI systems “general-purpose” models, seeing as how tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT can serve more than one purpose, sometimes not for the better. When placed in the wrong hands, these programs can be used to incriminate unwitting parties or create non-consensual porn.
The regulator is still ironing out the details of this act, but what’s known is that companies involved in these projects will have to become more transparent, responsible, and respectful or risk paying fines of up to 6% of their total worldwide yearly earnings. The laws are expected to be passed in the second half of 2023.
[via PetaPixel and MIT Technology Review, cover photo 242843461 © Golubovy | Dreamstime.com]
