Europeans Are About to Find Out How Entrenched AI Is in Their Daily Lives

LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyAdvertisements, music recommendations, calendar management apps, and complaint hotlines—if they use AI, Europeans will need to be told.

Starting on Sunday, citizens of the European Union must be informed when they are interacting with an AI system or viewing content generated or altered by the technology. These new transparency regulations come as part of the bloc’s Artificial Intelligence Act, which goes into effect August 2. The act is intended to reduce deception and manipulation, and help people make informed choices within the wider aim of fostering trustworthy AI in Europe.

“If a provider’s really compliant with the transparency obligations, it will become very visible how much AI is used,” Frederiek Fernhout, a technology lawyer at Stibbe, tells WIRED. “Especially in marketing.”

Ads or corporate social media posts using deepfakes will be slapped with a label stating they are AI-generated. Chatbots and hotlines handling complaints and other issues will have to state clearly if they are AI-based. Call centers using machine learning to monitor caller emotions and detect frustration will need to declare they are doing so at the start of the call.

Even among businesses, any commercial use of the technology, including scheduling appointments, handling correspondence, or negotiating contracts, will have to be declared. If companies don’t comply, they will face fines of up to €15 million ($17 million) or 3 percent of worldwide annual turnover—whichever is higher.

Model developers will also be subject to the new law, and will be monitored by the European Commission’s recently established AI Office. That includes companies beyond the obvious examples of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. Thibau Duquin, a technology and data lawyer at Stibbe, pointed to firms like Spotify, which uses AI-powered recommendations, or Adobe for its AI editing features in Photoshop.

“When you start looking, it’s everywhere, and all this content will have to be labeled from now on,” says Duquin.

The reach of the new law could lead to information overload, critics say. “Excessive labeling can cause ‘banner blindness’ with endless notifications,” Boniface de Champris, AI policy lead at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, warned in December. “If we have to label everything, from simple spell-checked emails to photos with a filter, the labeling of AI content will lose all meaning.”

The new legislation is resonant of the EU’s privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force in 2018. In granting consumers new rights to understand and control how companies used their personal information, the regulation changed how people experience the web. It introduced ubiquitous cookie-consent pop-ups, leaving many web users with “cookie fatigue,” and caused a scramble by businesses to comply.

The challenges of adopting and enforcing such technical regulations resonate too, says Fernhout. “Still, a lot of terms are not clear and need specific guidance from the authorities, and I think the same will happen here,” she says. “It is also very technical so these requirements need to be built into the underlying systems as well, which complicates it.”

The EU has allowed for a transitional period, until December, for AI model providers to label synthetic audio, image, video, or text in a machine-readable format so that this material can be detected as AI-generated, clearly recognizing the technical challenge of implementing this. Other compliance deadlines within the act have been delayed, as the European AI Office has taken longer than expected to produce key compliance guidelines.

The bloc’s 27 member countries are also at different stages of setting up their supervisory frameworks, meaning enforcement “might not be as day one immediate or uniform as we think," Rosie Nance, a data and AI regulatory lawyer at Norton Rose Fulbright, tells WIRED, cautioning “we’re not necessarily going to see consistent enforcement straight away.”

Nevertheless, the sweeping reach of the regulation will eventually be a “gamechanger” for companies, Duquin says. “Will they be comfortable with labeling it, or will they go back to using systems that are not AI-based? Will they go back to doing things manually, or are they willing to take the risk of being transparent about how much AI they use, and continue to use AI for everything and disclose it as such?”

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