That initiative was inspired by ChatGPT’s rise to fame in late 2022. The instant popularity of a chatbot that could perform several tasks upon request, such as generating text, code and now also images and video, upended the bloc’s drafting of the AI Act.
Generative AI wasn’t a thing when the Commission first presented its AI Act proposal in 2021, which left regulators scrambling. “People were saying: we will not go through five more years to wait for a regulation, so let’s try to force generative AI into this Act,” Audrey Herblin-Stoop, a top lobbyist at French OpenAI rival Mistral, recalled at a panel last week.
EU legislators decided to include specific obligations in the act on “general-purpose AI,” a catch-all term that includes generative AI models like OpenAI’s GPT or Google’s Gemini.
The final text left it up to “codes of practice” to put meat on the bones.
2. What is in the code that was due May 2?
The 13 experts, including heavy hitters like Yoshua Bengio, a French Canadian computer scientist nicknamed the “godfather of AI,” and former European Parliament lawmaker Marietje Schaake, have worked on several thorny topics.
According to the latest draft, signatories would commit to disclosing relevant information about their models to authorities and customers, including the data being used to train them, and to drawing up a policy to comply with copyright rules.
