The European Parliament has approved a landmark bill to regulate the use of artificial intelligence.

The proposal passed the legislative body of the European Union on Wednesday with a majority vote of 523 to 46 with 49 abstentions.

Before the vote, two members who led the deliberation on the bill held a news conference. One of them, Italian lawmaker Brando Benifei, described it as "the first regulation in the world that is putting a clear path towards a safe and human-centric development of AI."

If the regulation takes effect, AI systems will be classified depending on risk.

Systems whose use will be banned include those for the evaluation or classification of people or groups with social scores, and others for assessing people's likelihood of committing crimes.

High-risk AI includes systems to evaluate people in school entrance exams and job recruitment and those to assess people's creditworthiness.

The regulation calls for feeding such systems with proper learning data and having humans oversee them while in use, to prevent them from making wrong decisions.

To ensure transparency, it will be mandatory to disclose that images, audio and other types of content created by AI that resemble those of actual people are artificially generated.

Violators would be slapped with a severe penalty. They would face a fine of up to 35 million euros, or about 38 million dollars, or up to 7 percent of the company's annual turnover.

The legislation is expected to come into effect after agreements by EU member nations.