Amsterdam, Feb 7, 2023 — Artificial intelligence has been a hype lately. Programs such as chatbot ChatGPT and art generator DALL-E are in the news a lot.
But AI is more than a gimmick and has the potential to change society and our lives. That is why work is being done on new regulations in the Netherlands, but also at European level. “AI is a growing wave that is quickly approaching us,” said D66 MP Hind Dekker-Abdulaziz this week during a committee debate in the House of Representatives. “We have to make decisions about the regulations this year. Only then can we surf along with the opportunities that AI offers,” she says. “Otherwise the wave will crash over us.”
The innovations in the field of artificial intelligence or AI are moving fast. In the Netherlands, but also in other countries, hundreds of millions are invested in the development of artificial intelligence. The government stimulates knowledge and talent. But the cabinet says it is vigilant about the possible downside of the technology. Dutch State Secretary Alexandra van Huffelen (Digitisation) shares the concerns of MPs who said that AI systems can work with (unconsciously added) biases they have been trained with.
This leads to discrimination. In the past, this has gone completely wrong several times. The best-known example is the benefits scandal. That has gotten completely out of hand.
For example, the Dutch tax authorities used algorithms to tackle fraud. But this involved ethnic profiling, so that tens of thousands of people were wrongly labeled as fraudsters.
