EP President Roberta Metsola joins co-rapporteurs Brando Benifei (S&D, IT) and Dragoş Tudorache (Renew, RO) to present the outcome of the plenary vote on the AI Act, ahead of talks with the Council. The transcript is the result of an automated process. Please check against delivery.

Strasbourg

press conference

METSOLA, Roberta (EPP, MT, EP President)

use of robotics and artificial intelligence (T)

BENIFEI, Brando (S&D, IT)

TUDORACHE, Dragoş (Renew, RO)

president's agenda

Press conference by Roberta METSOLA, EP President, Brando BENIFEI (S&D, IT) and Dragoş TUDORACHE (RE, RO), rapporteurs on the AI Act plenary vote

https://api.multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/documents/20125/70779354/1686565003373_I242467Chapters%5BSD-EN%5D.srt

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, President of the European Parliament, Thank you very much. Good afternoon to you all. Before coming here, I thought I would ask a Chat GPT what I should say about artificial intelligence. And it gave me this answer. I suggest you to highlight the importance of responsible AI development and usage. You could talk about the potential benefits of AI in improving efficiency and solving complex problems, but also address concerns around privacy bias and job displacement.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, President of the European Parliament, You could also emphasised the need for collaboration between policymakers, industry experts and the public to ensure that AI is developed in a way that benefits society as a whole. I think the answer shows that artificial intelligence is already very much part of our daily lives. Moreover, it raised a number of questions related to ethics, scrutiny, innovation and the essential need to get the right regulatory framework in place.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, President of the European Parliament, So now let me, as a real person, thank Brando Benifei and Dragoș Tudorache for your hard work. How many hours, days, nights it took. How many hours, days and nights it would still take for your hard work and for having found a balanced and human centred approach to the world's first AI Act legislation that will no doubt be setting the global standard for years to come.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, President of the European Parliament, I thank also the members, the administrators and assistants who worked so tirelessly to reach an agreement on this first set of regulations to manage risk and develop lawful use of AI. And all of this is perfectly consistent with our will to be world leaders in digital innovation based on EU values such as privacy and respect for fundamental rights.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, President of the European Parliament, I think we can all be proud of ourselves. Europe is leading and will continue to lead in AI legislation. I will just make a couple of observations before handing over to the co-rapporteurs. First of all, technology evolves. Innovation brings us forward and opens up new possibilities. And as legislators, we need to seize the opportunity.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, President of the European Parliament, It is about change. It is about understanding that we cannot afford to remain stagnant and about not being afraid of the future. Second, going forward, we are going to need constant, clear boundaries and limits to artificial intelligence. And here there is one thing that we will not compromise on. Any time technology advances, it must go hand in hand with our fundamental rights and democratic values.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, President of the European Parliament, And finally, we must reconsider how we legislate and think in the face of unlimited access to artificial intelligence because a new age of scrutiny has begun. So there are many things that cannot be digitalised, emotions, will, and judgements, or this belongs to us, to this house, which has the ability to set the tone worldwide. This is all about Europe taking the lead and we do it our way responsibly. Thank you.

SOUNDBITE (English), Brando BENIFEI (S&D, IT), Rapporteur, Thank you, Roberta. Thank you, President. I think we have made history today. We have set the way for the dialogue that we will need to have, we started having with the rest of the world on how we can build a responsible AI for our globe, for the systemic risks that these can entail, but also thinking of everyday citizens, consumers, businesses, institutions that need to be supported in having an intake of AI so that they can get the best out of the AI.

SOUNDBITE (English), Brando BENIFEI (S&D, IT), Rapporteur, To get all the opportunities out of that, but also be sure that they can trust that the institutions have built a system of safeguards that can identify the real risks, not overburden AI when it's not needed to do unnecessary checks, but do very serious conformity assessment when there is a high risk for health, safety and fundamental rights.

SOUNDBITE (English), Brando BENIFEI (S&D, IT), Rapporteur, And we need to have also the courage, also expanding with the vote of the European Parliament in this direction, to ban, to forbid those uses that we think are not to be accepted, that are unacceptable, unbearable risks in our context because we think they go against EU values.

SOUNDBITE (English), Brando BENIFEI (S&D, IT), Rapporteur, Today we had a last minute divergence in the Parliament on one point that on which the committee proposal, the one we worked on with Dragoș, has prevailed on maintaining a clear ban on real time biometric identification. There was the tentative to politicise this to transform these in a propaganda tool, but we have won in the Parliament to maintain a clear, a safeguard, to avoid any risk of mass surveillance.

SOUNDBITE (English), Brando BENIFEI (S&D, IT), Rapporteur, And at the same time maintain the possibility with the non-real time biometric identification to pursue criminals and any risks that we have in society. We have also proposed the, as you know, something that was not there in the Commission text and was not in the text of the Council. We have gone much further on the regulation of generative AI and general purpose AI foundation models.

SOUNDBITE (English), Brando BENIFEI (S&D, IT), Rapporteur, We have put some important elements on the table and we need to be clear that no voluntary initiative, no global effort to coordinate, which is crucial, I said it at the beginning, will hinder or influence in a limiting way the work that we are doing to have a strong legislation, especially on transparency in this case, when we deal with generative AI.

SOUNDBITE (English), Brando BENIFEI (S&D, IT), Rapporteur, We want content that is produced by A.I. to be recognisable as such, and we want deep fakes not to poison our democracy. So there are a lot of issues where we have worked also to enhance the proposal of the Commission.

SOUNDBITE (English), Brando BENIFEI (S&D, IT), Rapporteur, Now we will go to trilogues already tonight we will start this work so that we can deliver in time for this parliamentary mandate to be able to conclude this work. This is what we want to do and this is this will be our commitment. Thank you.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, Thank you first of all, President, for being with us here. Thank you, Brando, very much for the work that we've done together to get us to today. Of course, still a lot of work ahead of us with the Council. But already today, I think the political signal that we are sending is a very, very important one.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, Three points that I want to make to complement what President Metsola and Brando have already said. One is balance. The one thing that we have from the very first conversation that I've had with Brando preparing to go into the work with the shadows, the one thing that we wanted to achieve with this text is balance.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, Yes, it's true. The main objective stated already in the Commission proposal was that this would be a human centric approach to artificial intelligence, and we have served that agenda well without text. There are protections.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, I want add to what Brando has already said, about how seriously we have taken the prohibitions of use of artificial intelligence in the text, how seriously we have looked at the high risk applications and the mechanisms to make sure also, that we are not limiting and necessarily how high risk applications would be forced into compliance.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, We have introduced something that again was not in the initial proposal, which is redress for our citizens, for our users, because they need to be able to say whenever they feel uneasy about technology. And that goes into the issue of trust and confidence whenever they would feel uneasy about their interaction with the AI, they need to have the possibility to say so.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, And again, we have introduced redress in the text. We have fundamental rights impact assessments for the deployment of high risk applications. So, the agenda of serving the serving, the agenda of protecting our citizens is very firmly into this mandate.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, And at the same time, this is why I said balance. At the same time, we are also serving the agenda of promoting innovation, not hindering creativity and deployment and development of IA in Europe, which is something that is an objective just as important as the one to protect our citizens.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, And throughout the work that we have done over the last year, we have tried to build on what was already in the proposal to make it. So, first of all, definitions. We have worked hard and it wasn't easy. There was an ideological battle also in this House on definitions.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, But we achieved to have a definition that is not only clear, in terms of what is, but it is a terminology that is perfectly aligned with our definition. With a U.S. definition, that means that we can achieve alignment and help all of our companies to have a level playing field with others when developing.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, At the same time, we have a very clear mandate for standards setting. Something that in previous legislations of the EU, such as GDPR, we did not do. And then we left companies to struggle with legal definitions. But they had difficulties in understanding or translating into technical language and with standards.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, And we have only, and also, looked at how we write standards. Should it be top down or should it be bottom up? And we have agreed in this House that there will be bottom up standards setting, again, to make sure, that those developing a have a say in how these technical standards would look like.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, And that is something that helps that agenda of promoting innovation. Sandboxes, governance, again, other examples of how we thought that we need to bring in industry, we need to bring in the developers, the start-ups, those creatives that are already embracing and using this technology, so that they also find their place in Europe. And that's something that again for us was fundamentally important.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, Second thing, very briefly on convergence. Brando has already touched upon that. For us, global convergence is something very important and we do not look at this act as something where the Brussels effect will suffice. I said it many times in public, we have to look at Brussels effect differently this time around. Because this technology is the same everywhere.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, And therefore, we have to us as the European Union taking the lead on this, being the first ones to have the courage to put rules into place. But we also have to work with other like minded democracies out there to make sure that we reach alignment on the global stage, on how the signposting for the future, how the gods are saving for the future, in the evolution of this technology, looks like and is aligned with the efforts of our partners.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, And third, I also said that yesterday in the plenary debate, if this technology and this transformation, this profound transformation takes place by leaving people behind, then we have missed our goal. It is fundamental that we bring everyone along. And that means that apart from writing rules.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, Our governments and us here at European level as well, we have to engage in a very serious and coordinated effort to explain and to accompany our citizens in this transformation. It means that we have to invest massively in education, in reskilling of our current workforce to be able to integrate into their work.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, Because, otherwise, we would have forces in our societies that will resist. But we look at this transformation with a better eye and that's something that we do not want. It becomes ideological, it becomes partisan, and it's not how we see technology in our society.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, So, we are mindful of all of these three objectives. We will continue to be mindful in the work that we do in the Council, and I am convinced that we will prevail with a text that will indeed set the right standard for the rest of the world. Thank you.

Q&A, Question regarding the ban on real time biometric identification and the expected result on this topic in negotiations with the Council. And another question about biometric identification in migration control.

SOUNDBITE (English), Dragoş TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, -

Q&A, Question regarding on how the AI Act could affect France's use of facial recognition during the Olympics and another question on how the sanctions coming from the Act could look like.

Q&A, Question regarding the methods of implementation of the AI Act during elections.

Q&A, Question regarding the difference between how the American companies think of how the rules on generative AI should be put in place versus the European Parliament's approach.

SOUNDBITE (English), Brando BENIFEI (S&D, IT), Rapporteur, -

Q&A, Question regarding the EPP's position related to biometric identification and another one on the strentgh of the EP's position entering negotiations with the Council.

Q&amp;A, Question regarding on the difficulties of regulating the AI.

Q&amp;A, Question regarding the two exceptions in the AI Act regarding the exceptions on the ban of facial recognition.

Q&A, Question regarding the stance of the European Parliament on deep fakes and its effects.

Q&A, Question regarding the odds of the AI Act to enter into effect before the European Elections in 2024.

Q&amp;A, Question regarding the actual effects the law has on generative AI and if it leaves space for the development of an European generative AI. 

SOUNDBITE (English), Drago&#351; TUDORACHE (Renew, RO), Rapporteur, -