The AEPD requests "clear" regulations on the use of personal data to train AI
The president of the Spanish Data Protection Agency, Lorenzo Cotino, defended the role of artificial intelligence (AI) as one of the main drivers of economic and legal transformation during his speech at a meeting organized by the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), in collaboration with Google, Ecija, and the Spanish Association of Compliance.
During the event, held at the Ecija headquarters, Cotino stated that artificial intelligence represents “the greatest of the great technological and legal turning points of our time” and emphasized that both supervisory authorities and privacy professionals must have an active role in shaping this new landscape. "We are actors, not spectators, in shaping this future and ensuring it follows the path of security and the protection of rights," said the president of the AEPD.
In this regard, he argued that the advance of artificial intelligence should not be interpreted as an obstacle to employment or business activity, but rather as a structural transformation of work. “We must not put the brakes on artificial intelligence, but start to internalize that the natural evolution of work in virtually every sector involves a hybrid model,” he pointed out. As he explained, this new model will mean that people will "manage, validate, and control" the artificial intelligence systems that are routinely integrated into the management and decision-making processes of organizations.
Cotino also highlighted that the AEPD itself has been the first Spanish public administration to develop an internal policy on the use of artificial intelligence with the aim of conveying a message of trust to the market: to advance in the adoption of these tools, but in accordance with criteria of legal security and privacy.
The president of the agency also pointed out the impact that this transformation will have on privacy officers, as well as data protection delegates and officers. In his view, these professionals will be destined to assume a strategic role within companies, leading advanced automation processes and new services related to the control and supervision of intelligent systems.
He also warned that the growth of AI will also require the automation of some processes of human supervision. “The necessary human supervision will inevitably have to be automated in many of its tasks, as it clearly exceeds human capabilities”, he noted.
Regarding the European regulatory debate, Cotino defended the need to move towards a clearer regulatory framework that facilitates the use of personal data for training artificial intelligence models, although he insisted that this development must be accompanied by enhanced guarantees. Specifically, he called for a regulation that improved the functioning of AI systems and reduced biases, including certain treatments of particularly protected data, but under legal conditions that are "better defined" than those initially proposed in the Omnibus amendment to the GDPR.
Meanwhile, the president of the AEPD announced an update of the agency's biometric systems guide and welcomed the European Commission's proposal to ease certain restrictions of Article 9 of the GDPR concerning some processing operations related to the use of biometric data.
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