The European Parliament’s civil liberties (LIBE) and internal market (IMCO) committees’ vote on the AI Act overwhelmingly endorsed important protections against harmful uses of AI (artificial intelligence) in migration. The AI Act will be the world’s first binding legislation to regulate the use of artificial intelligence, including in the migration field. The text voted for on 11 May 2023 bans harmful uses of AI and subjects “high-risk” uses to enhanced safeguards. Among banned technologies are: emotion recognition technologies, that claim to detect people’s emotions based on assumptions about how someone acts when feeling a certain way, including to assess their credibility; biometric categorisation systems that use personal characteristics to classify people and to inform inferences based on those characteristics; and predictive policing systems, which use preconceived notions about who is risky to make decisions about the policing of certain groups and spaces. The voted text also labels forecasting tools that claim to predict people’s movements at borders as “high-risk” and subject them to extra safeguards but does not prohibit analytics systems used to curtail migration movements and that can lead to push-backs. The EU’s large-scale migration databases will also be subjected to safeguards that would apply elsewhere, but only after a four-year grace period. Read more about this vote and the AI uses in migration in our press release. |