ICLE Statement on the EU’s AI Act
PORTLAND, Ore. (11 March 2024) – The International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) offers the following statement from ICLE Senior Scholar Miko?aj Barczentewicz in response to today’s vote by the European Parliament to adopt the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act:
The AI Act focuses on restraining AI, while putting very little attention on supporting EU developers. It is difficult to say whether the AI Act will have much of an effect overall, positively or negatively. Its application will depend heavily on implementing rules that are yet to be designed. There is some hope that the whole framework will emerge as more friendly to innovation than a reading of the AI Act’s text would suggest.
What we do already know is that the AI Act does not address the key ways in which EU-based AI developers are held back by national and EU law. Developers face the risk of privacy and copyright laws being applied to them in disproportionate ways by myopic enforcers who do not consider technological and economic growth to be serious values. The chance for a considered legislative decision on how to address those difficult problems has been abandoned, with the false justification that existing laws provide sufficient clarity.
For more on the topic, see Miko?aj’s March 2022 issue brief on the AI Act, as well as ICLE’s more recent comments to the European Commission on competition in generative-AI markets. To schedule an interview with Miko?aj or other ICLE scholars about the topic, contact ICLE Media and Communications Manager Elizabeth Lincicome at [email protected] or (919) 744-8087.