Drawing on intense criticism from online publishers across the European Union (EU) against Generative AI (GAI), the present article aims to highlight the highly debated copyright issue of data collection for Generative AI training. Three questions are therefore addressed: To what extent is scraping data for GAI training considered to be a copyright issue; How Data scraping and data mining are regulated under EU Law and; How the future AI Act intends to deal with the use of training data.

On September 7th, 2023, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) upheld the decision of the General Court according to which the public can partially access documentation on the EU’s emotion recognition project (iBorderCtrl) in which it discusses the general reliability, ethics and legality of such technology.

Eight more American tech companies (Adobe, Cohere, IBM, Nvidia, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability) signed up to President Joe Biden’s voluntary commitments governing AI (second round of voluntary commitments). In the meantime, a third trilogue will take place on the other site of the Atlantic in relation to the EU AI Act proposal.

The adoption of the negotiating position by the European Parliament sets the stage for the trilogues between the EU institutions, while the European Commission is pushing for the AI Act to be finalised by the end of 2023. The European Parliament’s position on this legislative file reflects its members’ fundamental desire to make the EU a leader in AI regulation and innovation.

The legal and ethical risks that the use of ChatGPT poses, as well as the need to regulate the deployment of similar generative chatbots, is currently being debated across the world. The European Parliament is considering placing the use of generative AI models, such as ChatGPT, in a “high risk” category in its upcoming compromise text on the AI Act (Parliament Approach), thereby intending to subject such tools to burdensome conformity assessment requirements.

A fierce debate rages in Brussels over which AI systems should be considered as “High Risk”, while the systems in Annex II of the EU AI Act have attracted less attention. Here is a guide (with infographics) on the classification of ALL “High Risk” systems in the AI Act, as well as the corresponding conformity assessment procedures.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the U.S. Department of Commerce released, on January 26, 2023, the AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0.) in collaboration with the private and public sectors.

On December 6th, 2022, EU Member States voted on a “general approach” to the upcoming Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act). On the same day, 192 civil society organisations and individuals published an open letter calling on the EU to modify a number of aspects of the AI Act to protect migrants from the risks that AI systems may pose to their fundamental rights.

This is the first ever detailed analysis of what is the most widespread way in which Facial Recognition is used in public (& private) spaces: to authorise access to a place or to a service. The 3rd Report in our #MAPFRE series should be of great interest to lawyers interested in data protection; AI ethics specialists; the private sector; data controllers; DPAs and the EDPB; policymakers; and the general public, who will find here an accessible way to understand all these issues.

The French DPA, CNIL, stressed that “the current debate on facial recognition is sometimes distorted by a poor grasp of this technology and how it works”. This 2nd of 6 Reports of our MAPFRE series provides a path to understanding with a classification table presenting in the most accessible way the different facial processing functionalities and applications used in public spaces.

How to regulate the use of facial recognition in public spaces in Europe? This crucial debate has often been characterised by a lack of clarity and precision. Here is the first of 6 Reports from our big “MAPFRE” research project, a detailed independent study analysing the different ways in which FRT is being used and the related legal issues.

The European Commission’s April 2021 proposal for a Regulation aiming at harmonized rules across the EU for AI is a major legal development and the negotiations at the EU level will be particularly interesting and tough. Renaissance Numérique and AI-Regulation contribute to the debate.