Navigating the EU AI Act: The Role of Synthetic Data
The EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) has officially become law, marking a significant turning point in the regulation of artificial intelligence across Europe. This landmark legislation will reshape the AI landscape, presenting both challenges and opportunities for businesses impacted by new requirements.
In this blog post, we explore how synthetic data can help businesses comply, while also driving innovation and enhancing AI capabilities.
As of August 1, 2024, the AI Act has come into force, establishing the world’s first comprehensive framework for regulating AI. With a focus on safety, transparency, and respect for fundamental rights, the AI Act aims to position the EU as a global leader in trustworthy AI. The AI Act adopts a risk-based approach, categorising AI systems into four tiers:
Unacceptable Risk: Certain AI systems deemed of unacceptable risk are banned. Examples include real-time remote biometric identification systems for law enforcement and the creation of facial recognition databases through untargeted scraping from the internet or CCTV.
High Risk: High-risk applications are subject to stringent obligations before they can be marketed or deployed. This includes remote biometric identification systems and critical infrastructure components, such as those related to road safety.
Limited Risk: AI applications with limited risk, such as chatbots, must comply with transparency requirements.
Minimal Risk: The remaining AI systems classified as minimal risk face no specific obligations.
Similar to the GDPR, non-compliance with the AI Act can result in significant financial penalties, of up to €35 million or 7% of global annual turnover (whichever is the higher) depending on the severity of the infringement.
The AI Act places the majority of its requirements on high-risk AI systems, where data governance and quality are the foundation for compliance. For those systems in particular, synthetic data can provide substantial benefits:
Enhance Privacy and Data Protection
The AI Act emphasises the need to guarantee privacy and protect personal data throughout the AI system's life cycle. Devant’s synthetic data is artificially generated to replicate the properties of real-world data without containing any real humans or personal information. By eliminating the risk of data breaches and privacy violations, synthetic data enhances privacy and security, aligning with the key focus of the EU AI Act.
Mitigate Bias and Ensure Representation
AI systems must be designed to avoid discriminatory impacts and unfair biases. The underlying data for high-risk AI systems must be sufficiently representative of the intended purpose and user demographics. Moreover, providers of AI systems may only process special categories of personal data for the purpose of bias detection and correction if the desired results can not be achieved with synthetic or anonymised data.
Devant’s synthetic data can be tailored to create diverse representations of unique individuals, improving machine learning performance by ensuring it addresses all intended demographics and reduces bias.
Address Edge Cases and Data Gaps
Datasets must account for the intended purpose, including the environment and context in which the system will be used. This involves identifying data gaps and outlining how they will be addressed. Devant can generate synthetic data at scale, simulating various environments and rare events that are difficult or dangerous to capture in real-world datasets, thereby enhancing a model’s ability to handle such situations.
Achieve Quality and Error-Free Data
Datasets for training, validation, and testing—including labels—should aim to be error-free and complete for the intended purpose. Devant’s synthetic data is produced with consistent quality and free from errors that may occur in manually labelled real-world data.
Boost Technical Robustness
Technical robustness is a crucial requirement for high-risk AI systems. Synthetic data provides a safe environment for testing and validating models before they are deployed in real-world scenarios, helping to identify potential issues early on and continuously improve resilience to minimise undesirable behaviour.
Simplify Documentation and Audit
Transparency is key under the AI Act. Synthetic data simplifies data handling practices by removing the need to track consent and data origin. This reduction in administrative burdens streamlines the audit process.
Scale Up Efficiently and Cost-Effectively
If large amounts of labelled data are needed quickly, synthetic data can be generated rapidly and at scale. This allows for experimentation with different scenarios without the constraints of traditional data availability and is often more cost-effective than manually producing and labelling real-world data.
With the AI Act now in effect, businesses must adapt to its requirements. Leveraging synthetic data offers a practical solution for compliance while enhancing innovation and efficiency in AI systems.
Devant’s human-centric synthetic data solutions can help your business navigate this regulatory landscape effectively. If you’d like to learn more about how we can support your compliance efforts, please get in touch.
