Discussions at the EU Parliament about highly sensitive topics of AI

11-10-2022

Agori Michopoulou

International Justice and Human Rights Researcher

Global Human Rights Defence

The EU Artificial Intelligence Act is an EU law that assigns the applications of AI to three risk categories. The first one is the applications and systems that create an unacceptable risk, the second is the high-risk applications, like CV-scanning applications and the third category includes applications not explicitly banned or listed as high-risk are left unregulated. This EU law is a very important starting point for the regulation of AI that can bring up negative effects on our lives. 

On 5th October 2022, the EU Parliament’s discussions were focused on the highly sensitive topics of AI, like the scope of the AI EU regulation (AI Act) and the limitations to the use of biometric recognition. Biometric recognition is a debated technology that allows the identification of a person by its face or other personal characteristics. The initial draft that the EU Commission has proposed, included prohibition of subliminal techniques, exploitation of vulnerabilities, social scoring and real-time identification systems. However, the latter prohibition has some exceptions when it comes to kidnapping victims, the prevention of imminent threats like terrorist attacks and identifying criminal suspects.  Progressive law makers and civil society organizations have pointed out that these exceptions may  open the way to more generalized surveillance. Although, in the preliminary discussion there was a majority in favour of the introduced ban, that was referring not only to real-time biometric identification systems but extending it to ex-post identification and to the online sphere. The complete ban would go along with a resolution adopted in October 2021 when the centre-right European People’s party was isolated for giving law enforcement a margin for using these tools. 

This topic as well as the AI database and the General Purpose of AI would also be the object of discussions at the political level.

Sources and Further Reading:

Luca Bertuzzi. (2022, October 6). AI Act: EU Parliament’s discussions heat up over facial recognition, scope. EURACTIV. Retrieved on October 11, 2022 from https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/ai-act-eu-parliaments-discussions-heat-up-over-facial-recognition-scope/.

The Artificial Intelligence Act. THE AI ACT. Retrieved on October 11, 2022 from https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/. 

Mathieu Pollet. (2021, October 5). MEPs demand strict rules over AI applications in criminal matters. EURACTIV. Retrieved on October 11, 2022 from https://www.euractiv.com/section/data-protection/news/meps-demand-strict-rules-over-ai-applications-in-criminal-matters/.