The world's first laws for constraining the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) were approved by the European Union on Wednesday.
European Parliament lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favour of the AI Act, which classifies products according to risk in order to decide how much scrutiny to apply.
Developers of general-purpose AI models like OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot or Google's Geminie will have to provide a detailed summary of the text, pictures, video and other data on the internet that is used to train the systems as well as follow EU copyright law.
AI-generated pictures, video or audio of existing people, places or events must be labelled as artificially manipulated.
The act is designed to "nudge the future of AI in a human-centric direction", said one of the act's creators, Dragos Tudorache, so that the technology would move in "a direction where humans are in control" and where it "helps us leverage new discoveries, economic growth, societal progress and unlock human potential".
Fourth industrial revolution
AI has been the catalyst of significant stock market gains in recent months, led by NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) and other tech giants such as Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT), which has been a major investor in AI chatbot ChatGPT's owner OpenAI.
Some analysts have been calling AI the "fourth industrial revolution", insisting the recent hype is not a 90s style dotcom bubble - though many are in a quandry over a tech already doing the jobs of hundreds if not tens of thousands of workers.
"The AI act is not the end of the journey but the starting point for new governance built around technology," Tudorache said.
Marcus Evans, privacy expert at law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, said businesses can expect more detail in the coming months on the specific requirements, with the EU Commission due to establish an AI Office and begin to set standards and provide guidance.
“The first obligations in the AI Act will come into force this year and others over the next three years, so companies need to start preparing as soon as possible to ensure they do not fall foul of the new rules,” Evans said.
Forrester analyst Enza Iannopollo told the BBC "The adoption of the AI Act marks the beginning of a new AI era and its importance cannot be overstated.
"The EU AI Act is the world's first and only set of binding requirements to mitigate AI risks."
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