Trust in EU approach to artificial intelligence risks being undermined by new AI rules

The EU is winning the battle for trust among artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, academics on both sides of the Atlantic say, bolstering the Commission's ambitions to set global standards for the technology. But some fear the EU risks squandering this confidence by imposing ill-thought through rules in its recently proposed Artificial Intelligence act, which some academics say are at odds with the realities of AI research. "We do see a push for trustworthy and transparent AI also in the US, but, in terms of governance, we are not as far [ahead] as the EU in this regard," said Bart Selman, president of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a professor at Cornell University. Highly international AI researchers are "aware that AI developments in the US are dominated by business interests, and in China by the government interest," said Holger Hoos, professor of machine learning at Leiden University, and a founder of the Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe (CLAIRE). EU policymaking, though slower, incorporated "more voices, and more perspectives" than the more centralised process in the US and China, he argued, with the EU having taken strong action on privacy through the General Data Protection regulation, which came into effect in 2018.