Artificial Intelligence, OK of the Chamber to the Ddl. Here are the changes for businesses, justice, health and work

The decree then extends the tax benefits for impatriate workers to researchers working in the area of Ia technologies, while the delegated decree is expected to include measures to support training, including in schools.

The offence of 'unlawful dissemination of content generated or manipulated with Ia systems' is added to the Criminal Code, punishable by up to five years 'if unjust damage results from the act'. The use of Ia systems in an insidious manner will also be considered a common aggravating circumstance and will increase by one third the penalties in cases of substitution of person, fraud, money laundering, self-laundering, and market rigging. Provision is also made for a delegation that the Ministry of Justice could exercise, inter alia, to provide for instruments, including precautionary ones, in civil, administrative and criminal law to inhibit the dissemination and to remove unlawfully generated content.

The Senate committees have made a number of corrections, starting with the deletion of the special aggravating circumstance for intentional crimes where the use of AI makes the damage to the protected good heavier: in its place is a more generic specification of the criteria for criminal or administrative charges (in the case of legal persons, evidently for 231 offences) 'that takes into account the actual level of control of the aforementioned systems by the agent'. As regards civil liability, mechanisms will be introduced to protect the injured party also by regulating the distribution of the burden of proof, anchored to the classification of artificial intelligence systems determined at European level.

Article 25, as amended in the Senate, changes the copyright law by specifying that works created with the help of artificial intelligence are also protected by copyright, but only on condition that their creation derives from the intellectual work of the author. The use of AI to reproduce or extract content from legitimately accessible sources is permitted.

In the health sector, artificial intelligence systems have the function of supporting the processes of prevention, diagnosis, treatment and therapeutic choice, without prejudice to the decision-making, which is left to the doctors. There is, however, an obligation to inform citizens when using AI systems.

The Ministry of Labour will set up an Observatory with the task of defining a strategy on the use of Ia in the workplace, without prejudice to the principle that employers are still obliged to inform employees about the use of technology.

The Ddl is going back to the Senate for its third reading because, unlike the government's initial plans, the measure was retouched by the Transport and Productive Activities Committees of the Chamber of Deputies, mainly to remedy a controversial interpretation of paragraph 2 of Article 6. The rule in question, which was deleted on the basis of an amendment by the government itself and identical ones by the PD and Azione, stipulated that 'artificial intelligence systems intended for use in the public sphere, except for those used abroad in the context of military operations, must be installed on servers located on national territory in order to guarantee the sovereignty and security of citizens' sensitive data'. The government's retreat was influenced by technical opinions that corroborated the theses put forward by some associations of ICT suppliers and supported, during the first reading in the Senate, by the PD and Azione. The risk, according to this interpretation, was that thus formulated the rule would have had the unintended effect of making 'outlawed' even applications of daily and recurrent use in the public administration, such as e-mail (Outlook or Gmail), Word or Powerpoint, since they increasingly rely on assistance systems based on artificial intelligence that are not necessarily installed on servers located in Italy (an example would be Microsoft's Copilot).

But in the round in the Chamber, the government also gave a positive opinion to other changes put forward by the opposition. First of all, the amendment by the Democratic Party, first signed by Anna Ascani, which corrects Article 28 by intervening on the scope of collaboration agreements with private entities and public-private partnerships that can be concluded by the National Cybersecurity Agency, has passed. The proposal approved in the House committees circumscribes this option to EU countries. Only 'on the basis of national interest and subject to authorisation by the President of the Council of Ministers', the Agency will be able to participate in 'consortia, foundations or companies with public and private entities of NATO countries or non-EU countries with which cooperation or partnership agreements have been signed for the development of artificial intelligence systems'.

The go-ahead is also given to identical amendments by PD and Azione that add a reference to the 'national fabric' and micro and SMEs among the principles of the economic development bill.