Regulating AI: Applying insights from behavioural economics and psychology to the application of article 5 of the EU AI Act
This work addresses regulatory gaps for policymakers and stakeholders in AI governance, offering practical tools to prevent AI manipulation, though it is incremental in refining existing legislation.
The paper tackles the challenge of applying Article 5 of the EU AI Act by defining ambiguous terms and identifying subliminal and manipulative techniques from psychology and behavioral economics, illustrating how AI can implement these in real-world scenarios to guide stakeholders in detection and prevention, and proposing specific revisions to enhance protective effectiveness.
Article 5 of the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act is intended to regulate AI use to prevent potentially harmful consequences. Nevertheless, applying this legislation practically is likely to be challenging because of ambiguously used terminologies and because it fails to specify which manipulation techniques may be invoked by AI, potentially leading to significant harm. This paper aims to bridge this gap by defining key terms and demonstrating how AI may invoke these techniques, drawing from insights in psychology and behavioural economics. First, this paper provides definitions of the terms "subliminal techniques", "manipulative techniques" and "deceptive techniques". Secondly, we identified from the literature in cognitive psychology and behavioural economics three subliminal and five manipulative techniques and exemplify how AI might implement these techniques to manipulate users in real-world case scenarios. These illustrations may serve as a practical guide for stakeholders to detect cases of AI manipulation and consequently devise preventive measures. Article 5 has also been criticised for offering inadequate protection. We critically assess the protection offered by Article 5, proposing specific revisions to paragraph 1, points (a) and (b) of Article 5 to increase its protective effectiveness.