The EU AI law will not be future-proof unless it regulates general purpose AI systems

 
The original exclusion of general purpose artificial intelligence (AI) systems from the EU’s proposed AI Act, published in April 2021, risked endangering fundamental rights and safety. While the first partial compromise text has introduced an article on general purpose AI systems, it still fails to address the harms arising from these systems, writes Kris Shrishak.

Kris Shrishak is a technology fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

Risto Uuk is a policy researcher at the Future of Life Institute.

You might have heard that Meta, previously known as Facebook, recently released a large language model for any researcher to experiment with. Meta admits that this system has a high propensity to generate toxic language and reinforce harmful stereotypes. And yet, in the upcoming AI Act, all of the responsibility for ensuring the safety of such systems, also known as general purpose AI systems, is placed on the users. (...)