EU votes to ban riskiest forms of AI and impose restrictions on others

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The European Parliament today voted to approve the Artificial Intelligence Act, which will ban uses of AI "that pose unacceptable risks" and impose regulations on less risky types of AI.

"The new rules ban certain AI applications that threaten citizens' rights, including biometric categorisation systems based on sensitive characteristics and untargeted scraping of facial images from the Internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases," a European Parliament announcement today said. "Emotion recognition in the workplace and schools, social scoring, predictive policing (when it is based solely on profiling a person or assessing their characteristics), and AI that manipulates human behavior or exploits people's vulnerabilities will also be forbidden."

The ban on certain AI applications provides for penalties of up to 35 million euros or 7 percent of a firm's "total worldwide annual turnover for the preceding financial year, whichever is higher." Violations of other provisions have lower penalties.