AI Act, Europe and the regulation of artificial intelligence

An article by Francesco Berlucchi

The newspaper La Repubblica recently called her "the most influential person in Europe in the field of artificial intelligence". She is a woman, she is Italian, and she is an alumna of Università Cattolica, graduated in Political Science in Milan. Lucilla Sioli, Director for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Industry within the European Commission's Directorate-General for Communication, Content and Technology Networks, Connect, led the work on the AI Act, under the political guidance of Commissioner Thierry Breton.

The AI Act is the world's first set of rules on artificial intelligence and its use. "On the one hand, we are talking about an extremely useful technology, considering its potential in the health, transport and manufacturing sectors," explains Sioli, during the third event of the "Humane intelligence. Transforming Artificial Intelligence into a positive technology" promoted by the Humane Technology Lab (HTLab), the Laboratory of Università Cattolica that explores the relationship between human experience and technology. 

"On the other hand, this technology is a black box, basing its behaviour on probabilistic calculations, making it difficult to predict its predictions," Sioli continues . "Moreover, artificial intelligence uses data that comes from our human experience, so the risk of violating fundamental human rights is real. It is therefore necessary to make sure that the technology is designed and trained in a way that minimizes these types of risks." In the meeting "AI Act: the European way for the regulation of artificial intelligence", Sioli explains that "writing this regulatory framework was very complicated" because "there are tensions between the defense of our rights and the possibility of always having innovative technologies available". Precisely those that Europe must "know how to develop and use", says Sioli, in order not to depend on technologies that come from other parts of the world. 

The example, ça va sans dire, is ChatGPT. "Let's think about generative AI," he says. "It was created in the United States on the basis of data that very often comes from that context. If we Europeans are not able to develop similar models, we will depend on those provided by others. With all the risks that come with it, both from a data point of view and from a cultural point of view." It is no coincidence that Daniele Bellasio, deputy editor of Il Sole24Ore, points out that "artificial intelligence is based on eight language models, six of which are American. If we talk only about generative artificial intelligence, investments in 2024 amount to about $37 billion. And almost a third of this market is American."

One of the risks is that Europe's primacy in terms of rights protection could lead investments to "less regulated markets, such as China but also the United States itself," comments Bellasio. "The hope is that the governments of European countries will find ways to invest and help companies in this sector, so that Europe can combine its leadership in regulation with leadership in terms of research and development." Sioli explained that for this reason, Europe co-finances with member states a public network of supercomputers, such as Leonardo in Bologna, to encourage the training of large artificial intelligence models by European startups and the scientific community of the Old Continent.

"The etymology of cyberspace derives from the Greek κυβερ, rudder. So who is at the helm, and where is the ship heading?" asks Gabriele Della Morte, professor of International Law and expert in Artificial Intelligence Law. "Nathan Roscoe Pound, dean of Harvard's Faculty of Law, wrote in 1923 in his essay Introduction to Legal History a fulminating sentence: 'Law must be stable but cannot be immobile.'" Della Morte alludes to the tension between "the movement that the legal system must make in order to adapt to the changing demands of society" and its "need for rigidity", which allows "legal certainty". It is "an acrobatic game to which the jurist has always been subjected, a difficult test of acrobatics that becomes exasperated when the law is confronted with technology".

The solution, as is often the case in the world of law, lies in balancing interests. "We need to look favourably on innovation," explains Lucilla Sioli. "We based the AI Act on the concept of risk. The rules are commensurate with the level of risk that artificial intelligence can generate. And this level depends on the context in which the technology is used." The legislative approach is the one that the European citizen knows well, because it is already used in relation to the safety of products marketed within the European Union. We are talking about the CE mark, which certifies that the product complies with the requirements set by the legislator in terms of safety, health and environmental protection. 

"There are cases in which the European Union does not tolerate the use of artificial intelligence," Sioli continues . "An example is social credit. Then there are the high risks, such as those related to applications to employ people or medical devices. These applications must be certified before they are placed on the European market.' And again, there are the risks related to transparency. "Let's think of a chatbot: it should make it very clear to the user that they are interacting with a machine; Or, in the case of a deepfake, it should be flagged to prevent the spread of misinformation." Thoughts, at this time, cannot fail to run to use during election campaigns, as was recalled during the first event of this cycle of meetings. 

"A few months have passed between the arrival of tools such as chatbots, which are within the reach of more or less everyone, and the approval of this European regulation," Bellasio says . "This primacy does not derive from the fact that the structure directed by Lucilla Sioli took little time to write a law on such a complex matter, but is the result of years of work by this European structure that studied how to regulate artificial intelligence while the large multinationals in the sector were developing it. Then there is certainly the advantage of having the models to draw on, in Europe, to regulate this sector as well, such as the use of the CE mark but also the regulation of privacy protection."

Certainly, we are facing a revolution. "Revolution is the recurring word in the scientific literature in the field of artificial intelligence," says Professor Della Morte. "There are two orientations. There are those who think that we already have all the tools to adapt the old legal categories to the new problems. I think that, on the contrary, digital transformation is truly revolutionary, because it impacts on the categories through which we interpret the world and legal phenomenology, which are space and time." According to Della Morte, then, trying to "anthropomorphize artificial intelligence" masks the problems, but two major questions remain at the bottom: "how to regulate these innovations and what to regulate in practice."

"The choice adopted by the AI Act is a very happy one," commented Antonella Sciarrone Alibrandi, judge of the Constitutional Court, former Undersecretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See, who spoke during the meeting. "Beyond its European primacy, it is virtuous precisely because of the clear distinction between artificial intelligence systems that are potentially detrimental to fundamental rights and, on the other hand, all those applications that concern sectors, such as banking and finance, in which there is no impact on fundamental rights."

This was also clearly seen by analyzing many uses of technology in the business environment, during the second meeting of this cycle. Already very frequent uses. "As director of the Humane Technology Lab, I am very happy with the success of this triptych of events," concludes Giuseppe Riva. "I think artificial intelligence is a crucial issue. Our goal is to continue to explore the most advanced topics in this area. For this reason, after the summer, a whole new cycle of events will start." 

The interview is published on Secondo Tempo.