The EU’s approach to AI rules is too riddled with complexity

Just as the world is starting to come to grips with OpenAI, whose boss Sam Altman has both leapfrogged the competition and pleaded for global rules, the EU has responded with the Artificial Intelligence Act, its own bid for AI superpower status by being the first to set minimum standards..

Yet, were a long way from the deceptively simple world of Isaac Asimovs bot stories, which saw sentient machines deliver the benefits of powerful positronic brains" with just three rules: Dont harm humans, obey humans and defend your existence..

The AI Act has some good ideas on transparency and trust: Chatbots must declare whether theyre trained on copyrighted material, deep-fakes must be labelled as such, and a raft of new obligations for generative AI-type models will require a big effort to catalogue data-sets and take responsibility for how theyre used..

As Dragos Tudorache, co-rapporteur of law, told me, the purpose is to promote trust and confidence" in a technology that has attracted huge amounts of investment and excitement, yet also produced dark failures..

European firms are chomping at the bit to tap into the potential productivity benefits of AI, but its likely that the large incumbent providers will be best-positioned to handle the combination of estimated upfront compliance costs of at least $3 billion and non-compliance fines of up to 7% of global revenue. ..

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