The Council of Ministers has approved the Artificial Intelligence bill, with Italy aiming to become the first European country to legislate on the topic. The Undersecretary for Innovation Alessio Butti, with his Department for Digital Transformation, will have the responsibility for coordinating the national strategy on AI, which will be updated every two years. Today the economic gift announced by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni last March was also confirmed: one billion euros, which puts Italy on the European podium after Germany and France in terms of public financial commitment. Investments will be made through the Venture Capital Support Fund.
The AI Act, the European regulation that governs the matter, provides that each Member State will have a “National Authority for Artificial Intelligence”, without rigidly defining what type of body will have this responsibility. The Italian government has chosen a “dual” governance system: the ACN, National Cybersecurity Agency, led by the prefect Bruno Frattasi, will have the task of supervising the application of artificial intelligence, with inspection and sanctioning powers; Agid, the Agency for Digital Italy, of which Mario Nobile is general director, will be responsible for the execution of the national strategy, for promoting innovation and the development of AI, and for defining the procedures and exercising the functions and tasks relating to the evaluation, accreditation and monitoring of the entities responsible for verifying the compliance of artificial intelligence systems.
Justice and crimes
The bill also intervenes in the judicial system, in the civil, administrative and criminal fields, delegating the government to adopt, within 12 months, one or more legislative decrees to regulate the illicit use of artificial intelligence. In particular, new crimes and new precautionary tools will be introduced to inhibit the diffusion and remove contents illicitly generated with the help of artificial intelligence systems, as well as a new aggravating circumstance linked to the use of AI in the commission of certain crimes. The penal code will be modified with the insertion of the art. 612-quater, “Illicit dissemination of content generated or manipulated with artificial intelligence systems”, which provides for a penalty of one to five years of imprisonment.
The use of AI in the criminal field is excluded, except for the organization and simplification of work and for research. “The decision on the interpretation of the law, on the evaluation of facts and evidence and on the adoption of any measure is always reserved to the magistrate”, so as to exclude the possibility of an algorithm deciding on the validity of the evidence or the guilt of someone, as already imagined
In terms of protection of users, personal data and information, the bill provides that contents generated or modified by artificial intelligence, “altered in such a way as to present as real data, facts and information which are not” must have a stamp, a visible and recognizable brand with the acronym “IA”. Unless it is a manifestly “creative, satirical, artistic or fictitious program, without prejudice to protections for the rights and freedoms of third parties”. Authors will always be able, through an opt-out procedure, to request that their works not be used to train artificial intelligence. The prerogatives of the Guarantor for the protection of personal data and the application of the GDPR, the European regulation for the protection of personal data, remain unaffected.
Health
The use of artificial intelligence for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases, development of drugs, therapies and rehabilitation technologies, creation of medical devices must always be communicated to the interested party through information which may be published on the website of the owner of the treatment. Agenas, the National Agency for regional health services, will design and create the artificial intelligence platform to support the purposes of treatment and territorial assistance, fed with the data strictly necessary for the provision of services.
The bill establishes the Observatory on the adoption of artificial intelligence systems in the world of work at the Ministry of Labor and Social Policies with the task of defining a strategy on the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace, monitoring the impact on labor market, identify the work sectors most affected by this technological revolution.
The “carve-out” on national security and defense. As in the case of the American executive order and the European AI Act, matters of national security and defense, and the activities carried out by the armed forces and police forces in these areas, are excluded from the scope of the bill.
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