The European Parliament has given final authorization to comprehensive EU laws governing artificial intelligence, including sophisticated systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The comprehensive regulation was approved on Wednesday by 523 MPs in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, with 46 voting against it.
Senior European Union officials said the guidelines, which were first proposed in 2021, will protect citizens from the potential harms of a rapidly evolving technology while still encouraging innovation in the region.
Brussels has rushed to pass the new regulation since OpenAI’s Microsoft-backed ChatGPT debuted in late 2022, sparking a worldwide AI race.
ChatGPT stunned the world with its human-like capabilities, including digesting dense language, creating poems in seconds, and passing medical exams, igniting interest in generative AI. DALL-E and Midjourney are two instances of generative AI models that generate visuals, while others generate sounds from simple input in daily language.
The EU’s 27 member states are likely to approve the document in April before it is published in the EU’s Official Journal in May or June.
“This is the first regulation in the world that is putting a clear path towards a safe and human-centric development of AI. We managed to find that very delicate balance between the interest to innovate and the interest to protect.” Said Brando Benifei, an Italian lawmaker.
Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner, applauded the vote.
“I welcome the overwhelming support from the European Parliament for the Members of the group Initiative Urheberrecht (authors’ rights initiative) demonstrate to demand regulation of artificial intelligence on June 16, 2023 in Berlin, Germany.,” he said. “Europe is now a global standard-setter in trustworthy AI.”
