After more than seven months of protests and suspense, France finally decided to ratify the AI Act on Friday, February 2. The draft of the European Regulation on Artificial Intelligence (AI) was unanimously approved by the ambassadors of the 27 countries of the European Union meeting in Brussels. European Commissioner Thierry Breton was very keen to complete the text ahead of the European elections in June, which he proposed in 2021. He welcomed the regulation. “Historic, First World”. “AI law has unleashed passion, and that’s right! Today, member states approved December’s political agreement, recognizing the perfect balance struck by negotiators between innovation and security.He declared.
For the French government and the president of the republic, Emmanuel Macron, the settlement reached is a short-term setback but Paris believes it has emerged victorious from this soap opera in the long run. Thus, France tried until the last day and in vain to get additional concessions in the name of saving its AI start-ups. These issues focus on the regulation of “foundation models”, large software capable of generating text or images. These tools are made by some French companies as well as by giants like Google or OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT conversational robot.
Bercy and Elysee sought to limit the publication of summaries of the training data of these models to “trusted third parties”, for example the European AI Office created by the AI Act. Paris would also like to see a computing power threshold above which the most powerful models are considered “systemic” and subject to strengthened obligations for risk assessment and mitigation (bias, misinformation, errors, etc.).
Trade Secrets
In a letter sent to Prime Minister Gabriel Ettel on 25 January, 71 French cultural industry associations expressed concern that France “Tries to form blocking minority in view of February 2 vote.” Such a rejection would put the entire text at risk, with renegotiations impossible before the European elections in June. However, for representatives of cinema, publishing, media or photography, it was necessary to maintain full transparency of foundation models so that rights holders could check whether their content was used during the training phase – and possibly object to it or request remuneration in return. can But Germany and Italy, hitherto France’s allies, have finally left Paris in recent days to rally for the AI Act. different
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