Members of the European Parliament have outlined they want to implement a heightened set of rights to protect consumers in the wake of the growth artificial intelligence and automated decision-making.
It comes as Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee approved a resolution mapping out an approach to several evolving elements that have been forthcoming from the growth artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making (ADM) technologies.
Petra De Sutter (Greens/EFA, BE), Chair of the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee, commented: “Technology in the field of artificial intelligence and automated decision-making is advancing at a remarkable pace. The committee has today welcomed the potential of these advances, while at the same time highlighting three important issues that need to be addressed.
“We have to make sure that consumer protection and trust is ensured, that the EU’s rules on safety and liability for products and services are fit for purpose in the digital age and that the data sets used in automated decision-making systems are of high-quality and are unbiased.”
The committee also emphasised that when consumers interact with an ADM system, they should be ‘properly informed about how it functions, about how to reach a human with decision-making powers, and about how the system’s decisions can be checked and corrected’.
Those systems should only use high-quality and unbiased data sets and “explainable and unbiased algorithms” in order to boost consumer trust and acceptance, states the resolution. Review structures should be set up to remedy possible mistakes in automated decisions.
It should also be possible for consumers to seek human review of, and redress for, automated decisions that are final and permanent.
“Humans must always be ultimately responsible for, and able to overrule, decisions” that are taken via ADM processes, especially in relation to the medical, legal and accounting professions and the banking sector, MEPs underline.
