News and developments
Work on the AI Act. The financial sector's perspective on artificial intelligence regulations
Representatives from the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council reached an agreement on the AI Act, the aim of which is to ensure the protection of fundamental rights, democracy and the rule of law in relation to the use of AI solutions within the European Union, while boosting innovation and making Europe a leader in the field of AI.
Status of work on the AI Act
The news of the concluded trilogues was well received. Interest in the AI Act proved to be so high that two unofficial consolidated versions of the regulation were ‘leaked’ onto the internet on Monday, 22 January. One of the people who decided to share the consolidated text of the AI Act is Luca Bertuzzi, technology editor of Euractiv, who reported that “given the enormous public attention on the AI Act I took the rather unprecedented decision to publish the final version of the text”[2]. Moments later, a consolidated version of the regulation was published by Laura Caroli, Senior Policy Advisor at European Parliament[3]. Afterwards, the official version of AI Act was ultimately adopted at a meeting of ambassadors within the Committee of Permanent Representatives of the Member States (COREPER) on 2 February. The vote on the proposed text of AI Act in the Committees of the European Parliament (IMCO, LIBE) was held on February 13 and a month later (on the plenary session on Match 13) the vote on the regulation took place in the European Parliament. Therefore, it is worth mentioning out the latest arrangements regarding the content of the AI Act from the financial sector’s perspective.
Banned AI systems
Recognising the potential threats to citizens’ rights posed by certain applications of artificial intelligence, EU lawmakers decided to include in the catalogue of banned AI systems:
Author: Hubert Łączkowski
Footnotes [1] Draft Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council of the EU laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act) and amending certain Union legislative acts. [2] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7155091883872964608/. [3] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dr-laura-caroli-0a96a8a_ai-act-consolidated-version-activity-7155181240751374336-B3Ym/.
-
- biometric categorisation systems that use sensitive characteristics;
- systems that manipulate human behaviour and exploit human vulnerabilities (due to age, disability or socio-economic situation);
- so-called ‘social scoring’ systems, based on social behaviour or personal characteristics;
- emotion recognition systems in the workplace and educational institutions;
- systems for making risk assessments of natural persons in order to assess or predict the risk of committing a criminal offence (based solely on the profiling of a natural person or on assessing their personality traits and characteristics);
- untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases.
-
- use high-risk AI systems in accordance with the accompanying operating instructions;
- monitor the performance of high-risk AI systems and inform their supplier or distributor of all identified risks and incidents;
- store incident logs generated automatically by the AI system, if such logs are under their control;
- ensure that the natural persons, assigned by the financial institution to oversee the high-risk AI systems, have the necessary competence, training and authority as well as the necessary support;
- maintain the logs, automatically generated by that high-risk AI system, as part of the documentation kept pursuant to the relevant financial service legislation.
Author: Hubert Łączkowski
Footnotes [1] Draft Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council of the EU laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act) and amending certain Union legislative acts. [2] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7155091883872964608/. [3] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dr-laura-caroli-0a96a8a_ai-act-consolidated-version-activity-7155181240751374336-B3Ym/.