The EU Artificial Intelligence Act (GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
Why in news?
- Recently, European Parliament reached a preliminary deal on a new draft of the European Union’s ambitious Artificial Intelligence Act, first drafted two years ago.
Why regulate artificial intelligence?
- As artificial intelligence technologies become omnipresent and their algorithms more advanced; the risks and uncertainties associated with them have also increased.
- Many AI tools are essentially black boxes, meaning even those who designed them cannot explain what goes on inside them to generate a particular output.
- Complex and unexplainable AI tools have already manifested in wrongful arrests due to AI-enabled facial recognition; discrimination and societal biases seeping into AI outputs; and most recently, in how chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) like Generative Pretrained Trasformer-3 (GPT-3) and 4 can generate versatile, human-competitive and genuine looking content, which may be inaccurate or copyrighted material.
- Recently, industry stakeholders including Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak signed an open letter asking AI labs to stop the training of AI models more powerful than GPT-4 for six months, citing potential risks to society and humanity.
How was the AI Act formed?
- The legislation was drafted in 2021 with the aim of bringing transparency, trust, and accountability to AI and creating a framework to mitigate risks to the safety, health, fundamental rights, and democratic values of the EU.
- It also aims to address ethical questions and implementation challenges in various sectors ranging from healthcare and education to finance and energy. The legislation seeks to strike a balance between promoting “the uptake of AI while mitigating or preventing harms associated with certain uses of the technology”.
- Similar to how the EU’s 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) made it an industry leader in the global data protection regime, the AI law aims to “strengthen Europe’s position as a global hub of excellence in AI from the lab to the market” and ensure that AI in Europe respects the 27-country bloc’s values and rules.
What does the draft document entail?
- It identifies AI tools based on machine learning and deep learning, knowledge as well as logic-based and statistical approaches.
- The Act’s central approach is the classification of AI tech based on the level of risk they pose to the “health and safety or fundamental rights” of a person.
- There are four risk categories in the Act — unacceptable, high, limited and minimal.
Prohibition:
- The Act prohibits using technologies in the unacceptable risk category with little exception.
- These include the use of real-time facial and biometric identification systems in public spaces; systems of social scoring of citizens by governments leading to “unjustified and disproportionate detrimental treatment”; subliminal techniques to distort a person’s behaviour; and technologies which can exploit vulnerabilities of the young or elderly, or persons with disabilities.
High-risk category:
- The Act lays substantial focus on AI in the high-risk category, prescribing a number of pre-and post-market requirements for developers and users of such systems.
- Some systems falling under this category include biometric identification and categorisation of natural persons, AI used in healthcare, education, employment (recruitment), law enforcement, justice delivery systems, and tools that provide access to essential private and public services (including access to financial services such as loan approval systems).
- AI systems in the limited and minimal risk category such as spam filters or video games are allowed to be used with a few requirements like transparency obligations.
Conformity assessments:
- Before high-risk AI systems can make it to the market, they will be subject to strict reviews known in the Act as ‘conformity assessments’; algorithmic impact assessments to analyse data sets fed to AI tools, biases, how users interact with the system, and the overall design and monitoring of system outputs.
- It also requires such systems to be transparent, explainable, allow human oversight and give clear and adequate information to the user.
- Moreover, since AI algorithms are specifically designed to evolve over time, high-risk systems must also comply with mandatory post-market monitoring obligations such as logging performance data and maintaining continuous compliance, with special attention paid to how these programmes change through their lifetime.
What is the recent proposal on general purpose AI like ChatGPT?
- As recently as February 2023, general-purpose AI such as the language model-based ChatGPT, used for a plethora of tasks from summarising concepts on the internet to serving up poems, news reports, and even a Colombian court judgment, did not feature in EU lawmakers’ plans for regulating AI technologies.
- The bloc’s 108-page proposal for the AI Act, published two years earlier, included only one mention of the word “chatbot.”
- While the current draft does not clarify what obligations general-purpose artificial intelligence systems (GPAIS) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT manufacturers would be subject to, lawmakers are also debating whether all forms of GPAIS should be designated as high-risk.
- The draft could be amended multiple times before it actually comes into force.
Where does global AI governance currently stand?
AIBoR:
- The U.S., currently does not have comprehensive AI regulation and has taken a fairly hands-off approach. The Biden administration released a blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights (AIBoR).
- Developed by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the AIBoR outlines the harms of AI to economic and civil rights and lays down five principles for mitigating these harms.
- The blueprint, instead of a horizontal approach like the EU, endorses a sector-specific approach to AI governance, with policy interventions for individual sectors such as health, labour, and education, leaving it to sectoral federal agencies to come out with their plans.
- The AIBoR has been described by the administration as a guidance or a handbook rather than a binding legislation.
Regulations by China:
- China in 2022 came out with some of the world’s first nationally binding regulations targeting specific types of algorithms and AI.
- It enacted a law to regulate recommendation algorithms with a focus on how they disseminate information. China’s Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), which drafted the rules, told companies to “promote positive energy”, to not “endanger national security or the social public interest” and to “give an explanation” when they harm the legitimate interests of users.
- Another piece of legislation targets deep synthesis technology used to generate deepfakes.
- In order to have transparency and understand how algorithms function, China’s AI regulation authority has also created a registry or database of algorithms where developers have to register their algorithms, information about the data sets used by them and potential security risks.
India slips in press freedom index, ranks 161 out of 180 nations
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Why in news?
- India’s ranking in the 2023 World Press Freedom Index has slipped to 161 out of 180 countries, according to the latest report released by the global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
India’s neighbors:
- In comparison, Pakistan has fared better when it comes to media freedom as it was placed at 150, an improvement from last year’s 157th rank. In 2022, India was ranked at 150.
- Sri Lanka also made significant improvement on the index, ranking 135th this year as against 146th in 2022.
Top/Bottom scorers:
- Norway, Ireland and Denmark occupied the top three positions in press freedom, while Vietnam, China and North Korea constituted the bottom three.
About World Press Freedom Index:
- Reporters Without Borders (RSF) comes out with a global ranking of press freedom every year. RSF is an international NGO whose self-proclaimed aim is to defend and promote media freedom.
- Headquartered in Paris, it has consultative status with the United Nations.
- The objective of the World Press Freedom Index, which it releases every year, “is to compare the level of press freedom enjoyed by journalists and media in 180 countries and territories” in the previous calendar year.
- RSF defines press freedom as “the ability of journalists as individuals and collectives to select, produce, and disseminate news in the public interest independent of political, economic, legal, and social interference and in the absence of threats to their physical and mental safety”.
Concerns:
- The Indian Women’s Press Corps, the Press Club of India, and the Press Association released a joint statement voicing their concern over the country’s dip in the index.
- The constraints on press freedom due to hostile working conditions like contractorisation have to also be challenged. Insecure working conditions can never contribute to a free press.
Karnataka most innovative state in manufacturing followed by Telangana, finds govt survey
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Why in news?
- Recently, the National Manufacturing Innovation Survey (NMIS) 2021-22 was released.
Details:
- The survey was conducted by the government’s Department of Science and Technology in collaboration with the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) on the level of innovation in manufacturing in India.
- It has carried out its survey across over 8,000 firms in 28 states and 6 Union Territories (UTs), covering manufacturing and related service sector and MSMEs.
Key Highlights:
- It has found that the state of Karnataka is not only the most innovative in its manufacturing sector but also has the highest number of companies in manufacturing that carry out innovations.
- It also found that innovation in manufacturing is the lowest in the Northeastern states (excluding Assam), followed by Bihar.
- DST ranked Karnataka, followed by Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Haryana as high innovation states.
- Uttarakhand has the highest score among the hill states, while Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu has the highest score among the UTs.
- Apart from Northeastern states, low-performing states include Jharkhand, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. Andhra Pradesh is one of the lowest-ranking states despite being next to Telangana, and that’s because Hyderabad is now in Telangana.
Innovative firms:
- The report states that only 25.01 per cent of the 8,074 firms surveyed were considered innovative. Telangana, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu had the highest share of innovative firms at 46.18 per cent, 39.10 per cent and 31.90 per cent, respectively, among the total manufacturing firms surveyed from the respective states.
- Odisha, Bihar, and Jharkhand reported the least share of innovative firms at 12.78 per cent, 13.47 per cent and 13.71 per cent, respectively.
Background:
- The Indian government first conducted the National Innovation Survey in 2011 which found that the role of innovations in creating a competitive advantage for firms was rather underdeveloped.
- In 2019, the Department of Science and Technology decided to follow up with a second nationwide innovation survey and assigned the innovation survey to the United Nations Industrial Development
- Organization (UNIDO), with a view to focus on manufacturing and associated services spread across large, medium, small, and micro-enterprises.
Way Forward:
- The survey have been carried out so that both the centre and state governments, as well as industry, can identify the gaps in manufacturing and remedy them to be able to compete on a global stage.
- A focus on innovation in manufacturing will also push India’s ranking up in the Global Innovation Index. India ranked 40 out of 132 countries on the Index in 2022.
