The provisions of the AI Act on prohibited AI practices (Article 5 of the AI Act) will become applicable quite quickly, 6 months after the entry into force of the AI Act (i.e. from February 2, 2025).
As discussed in a previous post, the AI Act takes a risk-based approach and accordingly, we can distinguish AI practices that should be prohibited due to unacceptably high risks (prohibited AI practices, Article 5 of the AI Act, e.g. social scoring systems), high-risk AI systems that require strict requirements and compliance with a number of obligations set out in the AI Act (high-risk AI systems, Article 6 of the AI Act) and other lower-risk AI systems that are essentially subject to transparency obligations (Article 50 of the AI Act, e.g. chatbots). (There are additional AI systems with minimal risk for which no additional requirements are essentially laid down in the regulation. This category could include, for example, spam filters.)
In the following, I will take a closer look at the so-called prohibited AI practices deined in the AI Act.