The EU AI Act at a crossroads: generative AI as a challenge for regulation

By: Christian Djeffal (European Law Blog)

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have once again surprised people. New approaches to training very large context-aware systems have enabled generative AI systems (GAI), especially large language models (LLMs), which can produce content that is, in many cases, indistinguishable from the products of the human mind. ChatGPT, an LLM, has proven to be one of the fastest-growing consumer applications, and such popularity raises the question of how to govern and regulate AI even more pressing.

Discussions in the AI community have been at a fever pitch. Two letters with humongous support from the AI community tried to stir debates. One from the Institute for the Future of Life called for a 6-month moratorium on experiments to figure out how to deal with systems adequately. Another letter stressed the risk of extinction to get policymakers to act. These debates on GAI and large AI systems have landed them in the middle of deliberations over a proposed AI Act. While there is a great deal of overlap between the European Commission’s (Commission) original draft, the position of the Council of the European Union (Council), and the European Parliament’s (Parliament) position, they diverge on how to deal with the models that are under discussion…

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