I’ve been having a devil of a time figuring which version of the EU’s recently passed Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is the final one. So I wrote to the European Commission Library, figuring they could help me if anyone could. They replied that this link below is the official final version. I thought I would do the favor to anyone else looking to get this into Google search results. Here is the full title of the Act and a link to it:

Proposal for a REGULATION OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL LAYING DOWN HARMONISED RULES ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ACT) AND AMENDING CERTAIN UNION LEGISLATIVE ACTS

COM/2021/206 final

I’ll save more detailed commentary for another time, but I have to say I’m actually a bit disappointed reading it, because… it makes little sense to me. I was a huge fan of GDPR – that one really clicked for me. I liked their other album, DSA (Digital Services Act), though I think much of it may prove to be unworkable in practice. But the AI Act, I’m struggling to follow it, because it seems like they don’t really know what the thing is that they are trying to regulate. So they have taken one concept of “high risk” and very loosely organized it, and then penciled in a bunch of other sketches in the margins, and called it a day.

I guess this might be less of a big deal if it only affected the EU, but one big issue I see with these kinds of regs getting passed is that they other countries or actors say, “Well, look how good the EU did – they passed a whole act!” But probably a lot of the people who reference how great this act is have not actually read it in any detail. I don’t find it to be that good, and I’m not sure at the end of the day how much it’s going to protect against abuses of these technologies. I guess we’ll see. I’m not going to hold my breath about any of these laws holding back the tide in any kind of meaningful way though. Companies know enough to just route around these kinds of blockages in a global market.

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