Position Paper on the European Commission's AI White Paper

CSC welcomes the AI White Paper and its objective to define a European approach to artificial intelligence. CSC agrees with the Commission that AI and its applications have a huge potential to improve peoples’ lives and support the objectives of the Green Deal.

To boost the development of AI in Europe, it is of utmost importance to invest sufficiently in key capacities, such as high-performance computing (HPC), data infrastructures and skills development. Therefore, Digital Europe, Horizon Europe, Erasmus+ and Connecting Europe Facility Digital programmes must be allocated an adequate funding level, which should be at least of the level of the Commission’s original MFF proposal from May 2018. 

AI, world-class HPC capacity, reliable network connections, and related skills must be developed coherently and in convergence with each other. Increasing interactivity between HPC and AI communities is especially important, as these technologies have many common characteristics. The EU must invest in the strengthening of high-speed digital connections, not only intra-EU, but also between Europe and strategically important regions such as North America and Asia.

It is crucial to focus on the interoperability of data as it is the raw material used by AI applications. The EU must promote FAIR principles and interoperability of data at all levels, according to the European Interoperability Framework.

CSC supports the Commission’s human-centric approach to AI. The EU should also actively promote everyone’s control over their own personal data, based on the MyData approach. Maintaining human oversight in all AI operations is especially important.

The need for and possible consequences of any new legislation must be carefully analysed. Also the existing legislation must be examined and checked whether it coherent and fit for purpose. One piece of existing legislation requiring prompt revision is the Digital Single Market (copyright) directive. As outlined in CSC’s statement on the Data Strategy, article 4 of the directive puts commercial users of text and data mining (TDM) at a disadvantage. This regulation must thus be amended in order to remove barriers for TDM for commercial purposes.

The entire position paper is available here.