Promises and limits of law for a human-centric artificial intelligence

While the concept of human-centric artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a key principle to govern AI systems, two obstacles for its implementation remain largely understated. First, the excessive focus on accountability at the design stage of AI systems, overshadowing the fact that human values can be affected at different stages across the AI life cycle. Second, the market-driven approach of current regulatory initiatives, limited in their ability to actively promote human values. In this article, we argue for a twofold approach to tackle these limitations. On one hand, we propose a co-evolutionary and life cycle approach to tackle the lack of accountability of AI systems, showing that this approach can help ensure accountability beyond the design stage by enabling meaningful human control and human-AI interaction across the entire lifecycle of the system. On the other hand, we propose that regulatory initiatives should balance the market-driven approach by giving a more predominant role to human rights and by introducing explicitly the notion of proportionality test. This rebalancing would serve to handle conflicts between the objectives pursued by AI systems circulating in the markets and the need for an effective protection of human rights.