🇪🇺 Europe is losing the race and your life is about to change.
We need European Artificial Intelligence, with human rights and values at its core, and we need it now!
With the new US administration in power, it has once again become painfully clear that we cannot trust American innovation to always be beneficial to human rights and values. As Europeans we’ve made a mistake in the past, to allow social media from the States and China to become the main platforms for our daily conversations, to be the source of our news and to play a significant role in how we work.
We absolutely can't afford to let AI-companies influence us even more in the future, without ensuring they have our human values at its core! Foreign AI is a threat to our way of life in Europe, and we have to act rapidly if we want to solidify our human rights for the future to come.
AI has built-in biases and values
To explain why foreign influence is a problem with AI, let’s compare ChatGPT and its Chinese competitor DeepSeek - whose mere existence caused Nvidia’s stock to plummet this week. It’s clearly noticeable that both systems have inherent biases and values, based on the political alignment of their developers.
You can’t blame the Chinese developers for this, and I wouldn’t expect them to do anything differently, but DeepSeek’s responses are completely aligned with the world-view of the Chinese government:
Now ChatGPT’s responses align much more with European values, but Western LLMs have biases too. For example, a study into political biases of LLMs found that “ChatGPT-4 and Claude exhibit a liberal bias, Perplexity is more conservative, while Google Gemini adopts more centrist stances”.
Even if you don’t take this study at face-value, the point that every AI has values and biases built-in by design, still stands. This means that every Artificial Intelligence will spread its beliefs and values to those interacting with it, sometimes openly, and other times in much more subtle ways.
Knowing that we have another Trump administration in power, can we as Europeans trust that our human values will be protected and engrained deeply into AI-systems developed in the US? - That was a rhetorical question, of course we can’t! Even though Sam Altman has been a thoughtful leader in the past, he still made a large donation to the Trump inauguration, presumably to protect OpenAI profits.
European Convention on AI values
When Sam Altman was willing to make a donation to Trump, we have to think about what should drive innovation in the AI-space. Do we really want our tech-leaders to bend to every political current just to protect their shareholders profits? Should profitability be a goal at all, when we develop the Artificial Intelligence of the future, which everyone will heavily rely on?
Should profitability be a goal at all, when we develop the Artificial Intelligence of the future, which everyone will heavily rely on?
If you want it or not, AI is here to influence the future of our continent. A recent survey indicated that the majority of hiring managers wouldn’t hire someone without AI skills, and I don’t think this trend will stop anytime soon.
If AI is here, and about to change our lives completely, we urgently need a long-term vision to embed human rights and values deep into its core. This goes way beyond litigation based on risk assessments. This is not about inventing laws and regulations, it’s about ensuring the intelligence of the future will put humans first and spreads our common human rights and values!
In the 50s we were bold enough to make the European Convention on Human Rights, which forces state leaders to always keep human rights at the heart of their policy. Now it’s time to be bold again and make a European Convention on AI Values, which forces developers to always put our human rights at the core of their product.
The moment AI becomes available for citizens in the EU, its makers will have to ensure that all values laid down in the new ECAIV are deeply anchored into their product, so it can’t be used by foreign actors to mislead and misdirect. AI can bring positive change when we force it to prioritise and strengthen the human rights we value so much.
AI is the infrastructure of the future
To achieve the goal of European Artificial Intelligence, with human rights and values at its core, we urgently need to build and maintain our own critical digital infrastructure. Why do we inadvertently force our businesses to build on Google’s Cloud Platform or Amazon’s Web Services, simply by not offering a strong European competitor? It was short-sighted in the past, but it’s downright dangerous in the present. Our cloud infrastructure shouldn’t be dependent on any other country or continent at all.
With AGI around the corner, Artificial Intelligence will become a major part of our infrastructure for decades to come. Already now the majority of hiring-managers only hires candidates with AI-skills; you don’t have to be a Nostradamus to predict that the successful business of the future will heavily rely on AI - just like the successful business of today heavily rely on roads and cars. Artificial Intelligence will be the foundation for political influence and economic prosperity for the time to come.
AI will be the foundation for political influence and economic prosperity for the time to come
There’s a reason why the new US administration plans to invest 500 billion in project Stargate; even if we fully disagree with the direction they are taking their country, at least the US government understood the potential of AI and is ready to act and invest in it. Europe can’t afford to stay behind, or we risk losing even more influence than we already have.
What can you do?
With the rapid advancements in AI and the overwhelming effects they have, it would be easy to either downplay the situation or to feel helpless and be struck with inertia. The upcoming innovation is scary, but that doesn’t mean we are powerless.
If you want to help, educate yourself and use social media to our common benefit. Spread the message to anyone willing to listen: we need European Artificial Intelligence, with human rights and values at its core, and we need it now!