European legislative procedures are slow, but artificial intelligence is very fast. The European Commission and Google have agreed to start applying rules on the use of AI to avoid the temporary gap between the current situation and the probable date of application of the legislation that the European Parliament is preparing, towards the beginning of 2025.
The European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, met yesterday in Brussels with the CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, with the aim of sealing an agreement on the use of AI before there are applicable regulations. . "Sundar and I - explained the president - agreed that we cannot afford to wait until AI regulation is actually applicable, and work together with all developers to deploy an artificial intelligence pact already on a voluntary basis before the legal deadline. ”.
On Tuesday, the vice-president of the Commission, Margrethe Vestager, explained that the European Union and the United States have held talks to intensify cooperation on artificial intelligence, so that they can establish minimum standards by which to regulate them before the legislation enters into force.
The European Parliament approved earlier this month the exhaustive set of measures that will be its artificial intelligence law, which includes provisions to prohibit the technology from being applied in high-risk uses such as facial recognition and to ensure that the training of models of AI respects copyright legislation, among other objectives.
Breton usually shows public positions of firmness before the big technology companies and repeated the scene after the meeting with the leader of Google, with the publication of a tweet in which he stated "we hope that technology in Europe respects all our regulations on data protection, online security and artificial intelligence. And he remarked with GIF (an animated photograph) in which he made a gesture in front of Pichai, that "in Europe it is not about arriving and choosing", alluding to the fact that it is a market with rules.
Pichai also met with Commission Vice-President Vera Jourova, who expressed concerns about the spread of Russian propaganda about the Ukrainian War and the spread of Kremlin-sponsored disinformation on Google products and services. The technology leader promised to study these problems and also those of misinformation in the democratic electoral processes that exist in European countries.
