European Union lawmakers who are drawing up rules for applying artificial intelligence are considering fines of up to 4% of global annual turnover (or €20M, if greater) for a set of prohibited use-cases, according to a leaked draft of the AI regulation — reported earlier by Politico — that’s expected to be officially unveiled next week.
The plan to regulate AI has been on the cards for a while. Back in February 2020 the European Commission published a white paper, sketching plans for regulating so-called “high risk” applications of artificial intelligence.
At the time EU lawmakers were toying with a sectoral focus — envisaging certain sectors like energy and recruitment as vectors for risk. However that approach appears to have been rethought, per the leaked draft — which does not limit discussion of AI risk to particular industries or sectors.
Instead, the focus is on compliance requirements for high risk AI applications, wherever they may occur (weapons/military uses are specifically excluded, however, as such use-cases fall outside the EU treaties). Although it’s not abundantly clear from this draft exactly how ‘high risk’ will be defined.
The overarching goal for the Commission here is to boost public trust in AI, via a system of compliance checks and balances steeped in “EU values” in order to encourage uptake of so-called “trustworthy” and “human-centric” AI. So even makers of AI applications not considered to be ‘high risk’ will still be encouraged to adopt codes of conduct — “to foster the voluntary application of the mandatory requirements applicable to high-risk AI systems”, as the Commission puts it.
Another chunk of the regulation deals with measures to support AI development in the bloc — pushing Member States to establish regulatory sandboxing schemes in which startups and SMEs can be proritized for support to develop and test AI systems before bringing them to market.
Competent authorities “shall be empowered to exercise their discretionary powers and levers of proportionality in relation to artificial intelligence projects of entities participating the sandbox, while fully preserving authorities’ supervisory and corrective powers,” the draft notes.
What’s high risk AI?
Under the planned rules, those intending to apply artificial intelligence will need to determine whether a particular use-case is ‘high risk’ and thus whether they need to conduct a mandatory, pre-market compliance assessment or not.
“The classification of an AI system as high-risk should be based on its intended purpose — which should refer to the use for which an AI system is intended, including the specific context and conditions of use and — and be determined in two steps by considering whether it may cause certain harms and, if so, the severity of the possible harm and the probability of occurrence,” runs one recital in the draft.
“A classification of an AI system as high-risk for the purpose of this Regulation may not necessarily mean that the system as such or the product as a whole would necessarily be considered as ‘high-risk’ under the criteria of the sectoral legislation,” the text also specifies.
Examples of “harms” associated with high-risk AI systems are listed in the draft as including: “the injury or death of a person, damage of property, systemic adverse impacts for society at large, significant disruptions to the provision of essential services for the ordinary conduct of critical economic and societal activities, adverse impact on financial, educational or professional opportunities of persons, adverse impact on the access to public services and any form of public assistance, and adverse impact on [European] fundamental rights.”
Several examples of high risk applications are also discussed — including recruitment systems; systems that provide access to educational or vocational training institutions; emergency service dispatch systems; creditworthiness assessment; systems involved in determining taxpayer-funded benefits allocation; decision-making systems applied around the prevention, detection and prosecution of crime; and decision-making systems used to assist judges.
So long as compliance requirements — such as establishing a risk management system and carrying out post-market surveillance, including via a quality management system — are met such systems would not be barred from the EU market under the legislative plan.
Other requirements include in the area of security and that the AI achieves consistency of accuracy in performance — with a stipulation to report to “any serious incidents or any malfunctioning of the AI system which constitutes a breach of obligations” to an oversight authority no later than 15 days after becoming aware of it.
“High-risk AI systems may be placed on the Union market or otherwise put into service subject to compliance with mandatory requirements,” the text notes.
“Mandatory requirements concerning high-risk AI systems placed or otherwise put into service on the Union market should be complied with taking into account the intended purpose of the AI system and according to the risk management system to be established by the provider.
“Among other things, risk control management measures identified by the provider should be based on due consideration of the effects and possible interactions resulting from the combined application of the mandatory requirements and take into account the generally acknowledged state of the art, also including as reflected in relevant harmonised standards or common specifications.”
Prohibited practices and biometrics
Certain AI “practices” are listed as prohibited under Article 4 of the planned law, per this leaked draft — including (commercial) applications of mass surveillance systems and general purpose social scoring systems which could lead to discrimination.
AI systems that are designed to manipulate human behavior, decisions or opinions to a detrimental end (such as via dark pattern design UIs), are also listed as prohibited under Article 4; as are systems that use personal data to generate predictions in order to (detrimentally) target the vulnerabilities of persons or groups of people.
A casual reader might assume the regulation is proposing to ban, at a stroke, practices like behavioral advertising based on people tracking — aka the business models of companies like Facebook and Google. However that assumes adtech giants will accept that their tools have a detrimental impact on users.
On the contrary, their regulatory circumvention strategy is based on claiming the polar opposite; hence Facebook’s talk of “relevant” ads. So the text (as written) looks like it will be a recipe for (yet) more long-drawn out legal battles to try to make EU law stick vs the self-interested interpretations of tech giants.
The rational for the prohibited practices is summed up in an earlier recital of the draft — which states: “It should be acknowledged that artificial intelligence can enable new manipulative, addictive, social control and indiscriminate surveillance practices that are particularly harmful and should be prohibited as contravening the Union values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights.”
It’s notable that the Commission has avoided proposing a ban on the use of facial recognition in public places — as it had apparently been considering, per a leaked draft early last year, before last year’s White Paper steered away from a ban.
In the leaked draft “remote biometric identification” in public places is singled out for “stricter conformity assessment procedures through the involvement of a notified body” — aka an “authorisation procedure that addresses the specific risks implied by the use of the technology” and includes a mandatory data protection impact assessment — vs most other applications of high risk AIs (which are allowed to meet requirements via self-assessment).
“Furthermore the authorising authority should consider in its assessment the likelihood and severity of harm caused by inaccuracies of a system used for a given purpose, in particular with regard to age, ethnicity, sex or disabilities,” runs the draft. “It should further consider the societal impact, considering in particular democratic and civic participation, as well as the methodology, necessity and proportionality for the inclusion of persons in the reference database.”
AI systems “that may primarily lead to adverse implications for personal safety” are also required to undergo this higher bar of regulatory involvement as part of the compliance process.
The envisaged system of conformity assessments for all high risk AIs is ongoing, with the draft noting: “It is appropriate that an AI system undergoes a new conformity assessment whenever a change occurs which may affect the compliance of the system with this Regulation or when the intended purpose of the system changes.”
“For AI systems which continue to ‘learn’ after being placed on the market or put into service (i.e. they automatically adapt how functions are carried out) changes to the algorithm and performance which have not been pre-determined and assessed at the moment of the conformity assessment shall result in a new conformity
assessment of the AI system,” it adds.
The carrot for compliant businesses is to get to display a ‘CE’ mark to help them win the trust of users and friction-free access across the bloc’s single market.
“High-risk AI systems should bear the CE marking to indicate their conformity with this Regulation so that they can move freely within the Union,” the text notes, adding that: “Member States should not create obstacles to the placing on the market or putting into service of AI systems that comply with the requirements laid down in this Regulation.”
Transparency for bots and deepfakes
As well as seeking to outlaw some practices and establish a system of pan-EU rules for bringing ‘high risk’ AI systems to market safely — with providers expected to make (mostly self) assessments and fulfil compliance obligations (such as around the quality of the data-sets used to train the model; record-keeping/documentation; human oversight; transparency; accuracy) prior to launching such a product into the market and conduct ongoing post-market surveillance — the proposed regulation seeks shrink the risk of AI being used to trick people.
It does this by suggesting “harmonised transparency rules” for AI systems intended to interact with natural persons (aka voice AIs/chat bots etc); and for AI systems used to generate or manipulate image, audio or video content (aka deepfakes).
“Certain AI systems intended to interact with natural persons or to generate content may pose specific risks of impersonation or deception irrespective of whether they qualify as high-risk or not. In certain circumstances, the use of these systems should therefore be subject to specific transparency obligations without prejudice to the requirements and obligations for high-risk AI systems,” runs the text.
“In particular, natural persons should be notified that they are interacting with an AI system, unless this is obvious from the circumstances and the context of use. Moreover, users, who use an AI system to generate or manipulate image, audio or video content that appreciably resembles existing persons, places or events and would falsely appear to a reasonable person to be authentic, should disclose that the content has been artificially created or manipulated by labelling the artificial intelligence output accordingly and disclosing its artificial origin.
“This labelling obligation should not apply where the use of such content is necessary for the purposes of safeguarding public security or for the exercise of a legitimate right or freedom of a person such as for satire, parody or freedom of arts and sciences and subject to appropriate safeguards for the rights and freedoms of third parties.”
What about enforcement?
While the proposed AI regime hasn’t yet been officially unveiled by the Commission — so details could still change before next week — a major question mark looms over how a whole new layer of compliance around specific applications of (often complex) artificial intelligence can be effectively oversee and any violations enforced, especially given ongoing weaknesses in the enforcement of the EU’s data protection regime (which begun being applied back in 2018).
So while providers of high risk AIs are required to take responsibility for putting their system/s on the market (and therefore for compliance with all the various stipulations, which also include registering high risk AI systems in an EU database the Commission intends to maintain), the proposal leaves enforcement in the hands of Member States — who will be responsible for designating one or more national competent authorities to supervise application of the oversight regime.
We’ve seen how this story plays out with the General Data Protection Regulation. The Commission itself has conceded GDPR enforcement is not consistently or vigorously applied across the bloc — so a major question is how these fledgling AI rules will avoid the same forum-shopping fate?
“Member States should take all necessary measures to ensure that the provisions of this Regulation are implemented, including by laying down effective, proportionate and dissuasive penalties for their infringement. For certain specific infringements, Member States should take into account the margins and criteria set out in this Regulation,” runs the draft.
The Commission does add a caveat — about potentially stepping in in the event that Member State enforcement doesn’t deliver. But there’s no near term prospect of a different approach to enforcement, suggesting the same old pitfalls will likely appear.
“Since the objective of this Regulation, namely creating the conditions for an ecosystem of trust regarding the placing on the market, putting into service and use of artificial intelligence in the Union, cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States and can rather, by reason of the scale or effects of the action, be better achieved at Union level, the Union may adopt measures, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity as set out in Article 5 of the Treaty on European Union,” is the Commission’s back-stop for future enforcement failure.
The oversight plan for AI includes setting up a mirror entity akin to the GDPR’s European Data Protection Board — to be called the European Artificial Intelligence Board — which will similarly support application of the regulation by issuing relevant recommendations and opinions for EU lawmakers, such as around the list of prohibited AI practices and high-risk systems.
Natasha Lomas
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