The European Commission has officially banned the use of artificial intelligence virtual assistants during its online meetings for the first time.
Politico writes about this.
The ban was first implemented last week, during a call with representatives of a network of digital policy support offices across Europe.
“AI agents are not allowed,” read an online meeting etiquette slide at the beginning of the presentation.
The European Commission confirmed that it had indeed introduced this rule, but did not specify the details or reasons for the decision.
The emergence of so-called AI agents is an unexpected turn in the development of artificial intelligence technologies. The most popular application of artificial intelligence is chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can generate text, provide information, or perform tasks at the request of a human. But AI agents go beyond that.
Virtual assistants are essentially assistants that perform tasks autonomously and can interact in an online environment. They act on behalf of a user, performing a series of tasks to help people in their work or daily lives. For example, they participate in online meetings and take notes or narrate certain information.
While the technology is not yet regulated by separate legislation, the AI models that underpin it are already subject to the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act. The incident could also be a catalyst for the creation of separate legislation to regulate algorithmic management, where decisions about employees are made based on algorithms.
Thus, even in the digital space, the EU seeks to maintain clear rules for human participation in decision-making processes and is not ready to allow AI to automatically "sit" instead of real people.
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