Public Data, AI Applications and the Transformation of the State: Contemporary Challenges to Democracy

The use of AI applications and their abilities might have an unparallel transformative force on the state and the administration’s relationship with its citizens. Their application has the potential to usher in a new paradigm where alternative ways to perform administrative tasks may emerge. The deployment of such technology in the private and the public sector signals that the time has come for their regulation. The current EU legal framework and proposed legislation for regulating AI is limited in critical ways, as demonstrated by the analysis of the AI Act and positive law in Sect. 3.2. This chapter argues that AI applications employed by the public sector should be subject to a separate risk category for two reasons: first because specific safeguards are necessary in relation to the AI applications in the public sector in order to enhance the legitimacy and accountability of such applications, and second because AI applications in the public sector with access to the lake of data of the state create an unprecedented public resource, which must be safeguarded from malicious incumbents who would be keen to take advantage of such resource for self-entrenchment purposes.