What’s It About?
The European Union’s (EU’s) new Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) that was signed into legislation in July has taken effect from 1 August 2024 and has now sparked an angry response from Tech Companies in a letter co-signed by leading Tech entities to the EU regulator.
The EU AI Act has wide-ranging of impact on companies that offer AI products, services, or systems that are used within the EU, and is the first regional act regulating AI standards and has set the bar for AI regulation and enforcement worldwide, transforming AI governance for companies using AI in products and/or services targeting EU residents.
Ai Large Language Models require massive amounts of data to “train their Ai models” and this is raising the regulation temperatures across the globe due to many instances of a free-for-all data scraping process that includes private work and data.
The 36 Big Tech companies who signed a letter addressing the EU regulator include Meta, Spotify, Ericsson and SAP, have indicated that the EU region could miss out on the AI advances in productivity and scientific research and the economic benefits they believe this will bring.
The 36 signatories, have stated that the Tech industry needs clear harmonized regulation for the use of personal data for investment to take place and not a landscape of moving goalposts, warning that its “fragmented” regulation around AI could hamper innovation and progress.
Is the Criticism Justified?
The read of this unusual move by the Tech industry, from several commentators, is that they see it as a form of bullying and an attempt to coerce European regulators in granting them leave to use personal data with impunity and without due consideration for personal safety and protection from personal data exploitation.
Attention has also been drawn to the recent spate of legal actions taken against several large Tech companies who have overstepped with data scraping and unethical market behavior to secure advantages in the Ai tech advances that are posed to created massive profits for these companies at the expense of smaller companies and in cases at the expense of personal and company data security.
What is at Risk?
AI has also driven a lot of discussion in recent months about the safety and security around Ai developed deep fakes that imitate voice and images that are difficult to detect and pose one of the largest security threats that exist today.
Many believe that in order to mitigate risks around Ai usage, the new EU regulations are exactly the clear and concise parameters and regulations needed to ensure safe development and usage of these new powerful AI models.
Despite suggestions from the Tech companies that insist there will be billions in profit missed, should they not be permitted to utilise data as they wish, there is much concern that unfettered access and use of data can be equally economically devastating to many.
Take artists, musicians, writers, programmers and even legal and medical practitioners who may have their own expertise made redundant by Large Language AI models learning and using their knowledge and existing work to generate cheaper services and products.
What is the Solution?
A future balance, of the potential use and opportunity to improve things with AI, must be equally balanced with the risk of job losses, security and copyright and intellectual property encroachments contained within those self-same developments.
Africa as a whole, as well as other regions worldwide, need to adopt a clear-cut AI policy and regulation development and adoption urgently and regional bodies should be driving the development of these to ensure that the continent opens the door to further investments as well as providing clear risk avoidance.
