LA REGULACIÓN DE LA INTELIGENCIA ARTIFICIAL EN EUROPA.

A few weeks before finalizing this article the final texts of both the Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (the so-called AI Act) and the Council of Europe Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law became known. Both regulatory initiatives are the outcome of a process of legislative, institutional, social, technological and economic debate that dates back several years and that is based on the conviction, as stated in the European Commission's White Paper on Artificial Intelligence, that artificial intelligence «will change our lives by improving healthcare (e.g. making diagnosis more precise, enabling better prevention of diseases), increasing the efficiency of farming, contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation, improving the efficiency of production systems through predictive maintenance, increasing the security of Europeans, and in many other ways that we can only begin to imagine. At the same time, Artificial Intelligence (AI) entails a number of potential risks, such as opaque decision-making, gender-based or other kinds of discrimination, intrusion in our private lives or being used for criminal purposes». In the following pages we will analyse the legal responses that have been given in Europe to the challenge of regulating AI in a manner that is not apocalyptic but not completely integrated either: how these rules define artificial intelligence, which principles underpin them, the choice for a risk-based regulatory approach, the structural differences between the EU Regulation and the Council of Europe Framework Convention, the treatment of general-purpose AI models, as well as the possible 'Brussels effect' and 'Strasburg effect' these rules may trigger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]