The first measures of the European AI Act will come into effect on Sunday, February 2 –coincidentally, just a few days before the Summit for Action on Artificial Intelligence (AI) on February 10 and 11 in Paris. Although the symbolism is strong, for the time being, this first part only concerns certain prohibited uses.

Implementation of the text, which is the most ambitious in the world at this stage, will be gradual and is still the subject of debate, if not outright challenges. These issues are sure to be raised at the gathering, where the Élysée Palace is expecting 100 heads of state, many of them American and Chinese, as well as civil society players and AI company heads, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Sundar Pichai (Google).

In concrete terms, this Sunday will see a ban on certain uses of AI deemed unacceptable by the AI Act. These include social rating software, whether private or public, such as that used by China, individual predictive policing AI aimed at profiling people by estimating their propensity to commit offenses, and also emotion recognition at work or school, to analyze the behavior of an employee or pupil. Also banned are the exploitation of people's vulnerabilities, manipulation or subliminal techniques. And, finally, the identification of people by facial recognition in real time in public spaces, as well as the biometric categorization of people to deduce their race, political or religious opinions, sexual orientation or trade-union membership, lists the European Commission website. Certain exceptions have been made for law enforcement.

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