EU AI Act adopts OECD Definition of AI

Posted on Updated on

Over the recent months, the EU AI Act has been making progress through the various hoop in the EU. Various committees and working groups have examined different parts of the AI Act and how it will impact the wider population. Their recommendations have been added to the EU Act and it has now progressed to the next stage for ratification in the EU Parliament which should happen in a few months time.

There are lots of terms within the EU AI Act which needed defining, with the most crucial one being the definition of AI, and this definition underpins the entire act, and all the other definitions of terms throughout the EU AI Act. Back in March of this year, the various political groups working on the EU AI Act reached an agreement on the definition of AI (Artificial Intelligence). The EI AI Act adopts, or is based on, the OECD definition of AI.

“Artificial intelligence system’ (AI system) means a machine-based system that is designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that can, for explicit or implicit objectives, generate output such as predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing physical or virtual environments”

The working groups wanted the AI definition to be closely aligned with the work of international organisations working on artificial intelligence to ensure legal certainty, harmonisation and wide acceptance. The wording includes reference to predictions includes content, this is to ensure generative AI models like ChatGPT are included in the regulation.

Other definitions included are, significant risk, biometric authentication and identification.

“‘Significant risk’ means a risk that is significant in terms of its severity, intensity, probability of occurrence, duration of its effects, and its ability to affect an individual, a plurality of persons or to affect a particular group of persons,” the document specifies.

Remote biometric verification systems were defined as AI systems used to verify the identity of persons by comparing their biometric data against a reference database with their prior consent. That is distinguished by an authentication system, where the persons themselves ask to be authenticated.

On biometric categorisation, a practice recently added to the list of prohibited use cases, a reference was added to inferring personal characteristics and attributes like gender or health.

This entry was posted in AI, AI Regulations, EU, Machine Learning and tagged , , .