Articles for category: Europa

What’s Missing from the EU AI Act

The AI Act negotiators may still have been recovering from the political deal that was struck during the night of December 8 to 9 when two days later Mistral AI, the French startup, open sourced its potent new large language model, Mixtral 8x7B. Though much smaller in size, it rivals and even surpasses GPT 3.5 on many benchmarks thanks to a cunning architecture combining eight different expert models. While a notable technical feat, this new release epitomizes the most pressing challenges in AI policy today, and starkly highlights the gaps left unaddressed by the AI Act: mandatory basic AI safety standards; the conundrum of open-source models; the environmental impact of AI; and the need to accompany the AI Act with far more substantial public investment in AI.

13. Dezember 2023

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Taking Revenge for Dissent

Hungary’s latest judicial reform in May 2023 came in response to  EU decisions to suspend the country’s access to funds due to serious rule of law concerns. The reform aimed, among other things, to strengthen the independence of the Kúria, the Supreme Court of Hungary. Experience to date shows that while on the level of formal legal rules, some improvements towards the rule of law have been made, in actual daily practice, the opposite is happening: While steps have been taken to restore the independence of the Kúria, the Chief Justice is working on further eroding the independence of individual judges.

13. Dezember 2023

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Why Poland Should Join the European Public Prosecutor

After the Polish parliamentary elections, the question of rebuilding the rule of law in Poland has been frequently raised in academic debate. The discourse is largely dominated by the status of the so-called neo-judges and the legal effects of rulings of the politically appropriated Constitutional Tribunal. We would like to highlight another problem that the new government will have to deal with – the functioning of the public prosecutor's office occupied by people associated with the Law and Justice party. There is a great risk that high-level prosecutors may effectively block or obstruct investigations into the irregularities committed under the PiS government. We believe that a partial solution to this problem might come from Poland's quick accession to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office planned by the democratic opposition.

12. Dezember 2023

Protecting the Fairness of European Parliament Elections via Preliminary Ruling

Supreme or constitutional courts regularly step in to protect the democratic process by deciding election disputes. It is remarkable that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has so far barely been engaged concerning the European Parliament (EP) elections. Using Hungary as an example, I will argue in the following that the CJEU is institutionally well-positioned to help protect the integrity of the 2024 EP elections via preliminary ruling procedures. Hungarian democracy has been in decline, according to the EP, the Commission and various democracy indices. The problems include the lack of a level playing field, targeted action by authorities against opposition parties, overlaps between the activities of the government and the governing party, state funding of campaigning and party financing in general, lack of media pluralism, and the different means of voting for citizens living abroad (postal vote for some and not for others). I argue that the CJEU could and should be engaged to protect the fairness of the EP elections in Hungary.

7. Dezember 2023

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Beating a Dead Horse

With the view of potentially revising how the EU Council’s Annual Rule of Law, the Spanish Presidency of the Council had sent out a “questionnaire for the Member States on the evaluation of the Council’s annual rule of law dialogue. The provided answers will inform conclusions to be adopted following the General Affairs Council scheduled for 12 December 2023. Following the disclosure of the MS’ answers to this questionnaire, this post will discuss the added value of this discursive and secretive tool to address systemic threats to or violations of the rule of law. I argue that the answers reveal the dialogue to be an ultimately toothless and partially incoherent exercise that relies excessively on the good faith of its participants and lacks accountability by design.

7. Dezember 2023

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Daten und Werte

Grundsätzliche Fragen zum Verhältnis von Künstlicher Intelligenz und Datenschutz sind noch immer ungeklärt. Die geplante KI-Verordnung wird diese Probleme nicht lösen, sondern weiter vertiefen. Denn der europäische Gesetzgeber hat bislang davon abgesehen, das Verhältnis von KI- und Datenschutz-Grundverordnung eindeutig zu regeln. Die dort formulierten Pflichten für die Entwicklung und den Einsatz sogenannter Hochrisiko-KI-Systeme sollen bereits bestehende Regelungen ergänzen, nicht ersetzen. Nun zeichnet sich - paradoxerweise im Rahmen unionaler Bemühungen Recht zu setzen - ein Trend weg von positiv gesetzten, bestimmbaren Recht an. Regulatoren, Wissenschaft und Lobby reden stattdessen naturrechtlichen Ideen und einer 'KI-Ethik' das Wort, die letztlich vor allem auf eines hinausläuft: bloß keine strengen Regeln.

5. Dezember 2023

Europe and the Global Race to Regulate AI

The EU wants to set the global rule book for AI. This blog explains the complex “risk hierarchy” that pervades the proposed AI Act, currently in the final stages of trilogue negotiation. This contrasts with the US focus on “national security risks”. We point out shortcomings of the EU approach requiring comprehensive risk assessments (ex ante), at the level of technology development. Using economic analysis, we distinguish exogenous and endogenous sources of potential AI harm arising from input data. We are sceptical that legislators can anticipate the future of a general purpose technology, such as AI. We propose that from the perspective of encouraging ongoing innovation, (ex post) liability rules can provide the right incentives to improve data quality and AI safety.

10. November 2023

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We Don’t Need No Education?

Artificial Intelligence doesn't know what's 'true'. Especially, generative AI models like chatbots veer from the truth, i.e. “hallucinate”, quite regularly. Chatbots simply invent information at least 3 percent of the time and sometimes as high as 27 percent. Given the (future) use of such systems in nearly all domains, we might want such systems to follow more stringent rules of accuracy. And those truth-related rules are not the only rules for AI systems that warrant societal scrutiny. How those systems are trained will be crucial. In this blog post, we argue that a new perspective is key to tackle this challenge: “Hybrid Speech Governance”.

9. November 2023

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Defusing an Atomic Bomb

The sigh of relief was audible throughout Europe. In Brussels and other European capitals, the victory of the opposition bloc in the Polish elections sparked hope that the imminent change in government would end the illiberal course of the past. While years of democratic backsliding have left lasting marks on Poland’s political and legal landscape, the newly elected government is clearly committed to leading Poland back onto the path of democracy and the rule of law. However, one pertinent institutional issue remains to be resolved: the still pending procedure against Poland under Art 7 TEU.

3. November 2023

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The Right To Die Like The Trees: Standing

My name is dr. Dániel András Karsai. I am a human rights attorney. I am also terminally ill. In August 2022, I was diagnosed with ALS. ALS is a so-called motor neurone disease. ALS leads to an extremely humiliating life situation, increasingly depriving you of independence. For reasons unknown to medical science, this disease causes nerve cells that move the muscles to deteriorate, leading to muscle atrophy and ultimately complete paralysis. At the end of the disease, respiratory functions also cease, resulting in death by asphyxiation. The final stage of the disease is virtually a vegetative existence, without any possibility of conscious activity or communication. For me, this form of existence is devoid of all meaning and dignity. In this situation, I firmly believe in the arguable claim to demand the right to end my life with dignity instead of enduring meaningless suffering.

3. November 2023

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