Drawing a (red) line in the sand: On bans, risks and the EU AI Act
Channel: European Digital Rights
Date: 02/02/2022

The Drawing a (red) line in the sand: On bans, risks and the EU AI Act panel as a part fo the Privacy Camp 2022 sessions.

About the panel:

The EU AI Act contemplates a risk-based approach to regulating AI systems, where: (i) AI systems that cause unacceptable risks are banned and prohibited from being placed on the market; (ii) AI systems that cause high risks can be placed on the market subject to mandatory requirements and conformity assessments; and (iii) AI systems that pose limited risks are subject to transparency obligations.

While this seems like an intuitive approach, current classifications of systems under each of these categories reveals a dangerously inconsistent schema within which fundamentally dubious technologies like emotion recognition are characterized as “limited risk”, and systems can only be classified as posing unacceptable risks if they meet unreasonable high thresholds and arbitrary standards, exposing individuals and communities to nefarious AI use cases.

There is an urgent need for civil society participants to:

    Come up with a collaborative strategy for more successfully setting red lines for technologies that should not be designed, developed, standardized or deployed in democratic societies.

    Ensure that the high thresholds and wide exceptions carved out for technologies posing “unacceptable risks” are revisited to ensure that they are more thoughtfully drafted to prioritise the protection of fundamental rights.

    Learn from experiences in non-Western jurisdictions, and from civil society actors working in jurisdictions beyond Europe. 

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