Prohibited AI practices

Article 5 of the EU AI Act lists practices that may not be placed on the market, put into service or used in the Union. They include manipulative or deceptive techniques that distort behavior and cause significant harm; exploiting vulnerabilities linked to age, disability or social and economic situation; social scoring that leads to unjustified or disproportionate detrimental treatment; predicting that a person will commit a crime based solely on profiling or personality traits; building facial recognition databases through untargeted scraping of images; inferring emotions in workplaces and schools, except for medical or safety reasons; biometric categorization to infer sensitive traits such as political opinions or sexual orientation; and real-time remote biometric identification in public spaces for law enforcement, save for narrowly defined exceptions.

These are the highest tier of the risk pyramid, so the response is to stop, not to mitigate. In practice, an organization screening a new use case should check it against Article 5 before any other classification, because no documentation or oversight can make a prohibited practice acceptable.