This article delves into the EU’s groundbreaking rules for general-purpose AI (GPAI) models, as outlined in the politically agreed-upon AI Act on December 8th. It scrutinizes key questions, including whether this approach deviates from the original risk-based proposal, navigates the complexities of risk management in foundational models, and grapples with the uncertainties in benchmarking methods.

On November 8th, 2023, in the midst of the stalled inter-institutional negotiations between the Council of the EU and the European Parliament (EP) on the regulation of foundation models in relation to the future AI law, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) announced that it had updated its definition of AI systems.

On October 13th, 2023, the European Commission launched a stakeholder survey on the eleven draft guiding principles for Generative AI (GAI) and other advanced AI systems. This initiative comes a few days after the 8th annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum, organised by the United Nations.

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.

On May 17th, 2023, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) published its final report on the use of facial recognition technologies (FRTs) by Law Enforcement Authorities (LEAs). This report opposes mass surveillance, and, according to the EDPB, ‘the use of facial recognition by law enforcement agencies must be necessary, limited, and proportionate’.

Between 21 and 23 April, the European Commission (Commission) held the closing session of the European citizens’ panels, to debate and propose recommendations on virtual worlds in the EU. As a result, a panel of 150 citizens has contributed to the provision of 23 recommendations on ‘fair and human-centric virtual worlds in the EU’.

The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) is calling ‘for EU and national authorities to launch an investigation into ChatGPT and similar chatbots’, following the filing of a complaint on March 30th, 2023, on the other side of the Atlantic by the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Policy (CAIDP) in relation to ChatGPT-4.

On March 27th, 2023, the European Union Agency for Law and Enforcement Cooperation (EUROPOL) released a report on the Impact of Large Language Models on Law Enforcement. Having considered the outcomes that resulted from a series of workshops organised by the Europol Innovation Lab on how criminals can abuse LLMs such as ChatGPT, as well as how it may assist investigators in their daily work, the report provided useful recommendations on enhancing law enforcement preparedness.

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.