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Wow, that's a pretty badly researched post. And not one of the comments corrected it, during the three days it's been up. Instead they mostly gloated in a rathe
by tpmx 6y ago
Wow, that's a pretty badly researched post. And not one of the comments corrected it, during the three days it's been up. Instead they mostly gloated in a rather shallow and uninformed way.
Typical example: "The thought police have finally come to stop us from updating our beliefs…". Is this idiocy/jingoism a columbia.edu thing or is it isolated to their statistics department?
The meat of the the proposal starts at page 43 (https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/document.cfm?doc_id=75788 https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/document.cfm?doc_id=75788), which begins with:
The following artificial intelligence practices shall be prohibited:
(a) the placing on the market, putting into service or use of an AI system that
deploys subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness in order to
materially distort a person’s behaviour in a manner that causes or is likely to
cause that person or another person physical or psychological harm;
(b) the placing on the market, putting into service or use of an AI system that
exploits any of the vulnerabilities of a specific group of persons due to their
age, physical or mental disability, in order to materially distort the behaviour of
a person pertaining to that group in a manner that causes or is likely to cause
that person or another person physical or psychological harm;
So, yes, the EU is proposing regulating the use of e.g. bayesian estimation in implementing these practices.
- midasuni 6y agoMost headlines about the EU are inaccurate attacks. See bendy bananas etc.
- thu2111 6y agoEU regulation 2257/94 covers the abnormal curvature of bananas. There is no myth here, the EU does indeed regulate the straightness of bananas and has done for a long time. As for this law, it is going to be heavily criticised and this rather polite post from Gellman is just the beginning. Even the quoted part in the top voted comment is absurd. What exactly are these "subliminal techniques" that need regulating? How do they work? There are no AI papers I recall that discuss how to build a mind controlling AI, let alone one that's designed to cause people psychological harm. Does the EU really believe in this stuff? I thought government belief in subliminal messaging and mind control disappeared with the CIA's LSD experiments decades ago.
- mscharrer 6y agoWikipedia has a pretty good article on the banana issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_Regulation_(EC)_No._2257/94 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_Regulation_(EC)_No....
- tpmx 6y ago> There are no AI papers I recall that discuss how to build a mind controlling AI, let alone one that's designed to cause people psychological harm. https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks" "Core Data Science Team, Facebook, Inc., Menlo Park, CA 94025; and Departments of Communication and Information Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853"
- thu2111 6y agoThat's probably the closest but it's not AI related. They just tweaked how often certain posts appeared based on the smileys attached to it, which doesn't involve AI or even statistics really. Also, even if you consider the experiment unethical, it boosted as many people's exposure to positive emotions as to negative, so it's hard to claim that this is an attempt to create psychological harm. Any law that outlawed this would presumably outlaw all of psychology. And finally, it's a psych study. Is it right? Would it replicate? Who knows, by design it's not replicable. It would be bad policymaking to impose draconian laws on an entire continent based on a single questionable psych study that doesn't even have much to do with AI in the first place.
- tpmx 6y agoUnder this proposed regulation, it doesn't have to be AI. "machine learning, logic/knowledge, statistics", as long as the goal is on the list of bad stuff in the regulation.
- happymellon 6y agoIt does not regulate any shape of banana though. It standardises what was being used as a classification system. A banana that is S shaped is not banned, but you can't call it Extra.
- intricatedetail 6y agoWhy can't they just ban tracking? The way it is worded it would have to be proven that the AI exploits a specific group, which can be subjective. Whereas tracking direct goal is to extract as much money as possible and use AI to optimise.
- scotty79 6y agoDoesn't it make Facebook illegal? It causes people psychological harm and uses AI.
- tpmx 6y agoThey would need to stop doing those things to EU citizens, I guess.
- tomjen3 6y agoBy subliminal means? I guess you could argue that it is abusing some peoples lower intelligence when it suggests relevant groups for them, but that is probably a stretch.
- opsy2 6y agoEmotional state is probably an input to advertising/content engagement. Algorithms maximizing engagement probably then grow to manipulate emotional state as a proxy variable. Even if they weren't aimed to. From there, if an optimal emotional state happens to be "An impending sense of doom, terror of the pervasiveness of crime in my country" other "doom scrolling" etc, the algorithm could we'll be providing psychological harm. (No idea if this actually applies to this doc, as it's language and aims may be technical)
- ceres 6y agoIt is worth noting that in 2012, Facebook conducted psychological experiments on its users. So they have that capability. And god knows who else. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
- gpvos 6y agoI'm not sure it satisfies the criterion of "intent" (in order to in the quoted text).
- amelius 6y agoSurprised that causing physical or psychological harm (in any way) wasn't already prohibited. Isn't this just language to make the law more explicit?
- username90 6y agoDirectly causing harm is always illegal, but you can't outlaw all indirect ways to cause harm since it is unclear if it is the suffers fault or not. In this case this law argues that people shouldn't be expected to learn to cope with these practices and instead tech companies should stop doing these things.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- amelius 6y agoThen can't we extend this to all forms of psychological manipulation? Like coercing people into buying stuff they don't need?
- colejohnson66 6y agoTry defining that, because you can't. If I go into the store and buy something I didn't go in there for, was I manipulated by seeing it on the shelf? Are promo videos on an online game store "psychological manipulation" because they can make you buy a game you didn't need?
- mLuby 6y agoA/B testing to the rescue! A (control): rate of purchases of the item WITHOUT the ad present. B (experiment): rate of purchases of the item WITH the ad present. If A and B differ significantly then by definition the ad manipulates purchasers. And we all know companies track exactly these metrics, ripe for subpoena. (Separate question is whether this practice is bad for consumers; I'd argue "not all ads are bad" and "no ads is never bad" so to minimize harm, we should adopt "ads are bad until proven otherwise.")
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoYour quote stops short of the much vaguer subsection (c): (c) the placing on the market, putting into service or use of AI systems by public authorities or on their behalf for the evaluation or classification of the trustworthiness of natural persons over a certain period of time based on their social behaviour or known or predicted personal or personality characteristics, with the social score leading to either or both of the following: (i) detrimental or unfavourable treatment of certain natural persons or whole groups thereof in social contexts which are unrelated to the contexts in which the data was originally generated or collected; (ii) detrimental or unfavourable treatment of certain natural persons or whole groups thereof that is unjustified or disproportionate to their social behaviour or its gravity; Consider, for example, a supermarket chain that uses Bayesian inference to determine which products in which stores are theft-prone and need to be locked up. I think there's a strong argument to be made that violates (c)(ii).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- p_l 6y agoYour example wouldn't fall under, because the decision is not applied to humans, only to the products - i.e. there's no "credit scoring customers" and thus impacting their ability to buy those items, only decision on whether or not to have them in locked boxes.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoYeah, on further research I think you're right. I jumped the gun a little here.
- renewiltord 6y agoThe difference between the Marina Safeway and the Mission Safeway makes it clear this isn't a property of the products alone.
- p_l 6y ago
- jcims 6y ago>subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness in order to materially distort a person’s behaviour Doesn’t this generally describe all contemporary forms of advertisement? Or, for any given advertisement, how would you demonstrate it is out of scope of this qualifier? > in a manner that causes or is likely to cause that person or another person physical or psychological harm Physical is pretty obvious but psychological harm seems slippery. Not saying I’m against the idea, but this language seems like it needs a little work.
- username90 6y agoAdvertisement doesn't cause psychological harm in this context, otherwise you would get sued for abuse over phone advertisement.
- jka 6y agoIf we could quantify the amount of time and distraction caused by advertising, on aggregate, it's possible that opinions would change. A few companies do already have access to plenty of data that they could use to calculate these kind of reports.
- jcims 6y agoWhat’s the standard for harm? I think that’s the part that isn’t clear to me. What if an advertisement diminishes my self-esteem to some degree?
- RyEgswuCsn 6y ago> Doesn’t this generally describe all contemporary forms of advertisement? Or, for any given advertisement, how would you demonstrate it is out of scope of this qualifier? I guess if one is told (clearly) that "this is an ad" then it's probably fine?
- jka 6y agoMy two cents are that it seems like a pretty good start. It'd probably be possible for well-funded organizations to use automated data collection and clandestine communication methods to collect detailed profile information about people and then disseminate it in a way that attempts to make people fall in line with some particular ideology; or simply to harass people (wasting their time, which eventually amounts to a form of attack). Unlikely though that might seem, if such things are becoming technically feasible, then it seems worthwhile to put safety regulations in place to prevent them from taking too much hold. Enough automation of such systems could make it very difficult for individuals -- perhaps entire groups -- to backtrack out of whatever mindset the systems are leading them towards. Let's try to avoid those kind of outcomes.
- thecleaner 6y agoIts Columbia. They usually hate any and every regulation. I wonder what if any is the rational reason for doing so.
- bitwize 6y agoA university for the privileged embracing toxic libertarianism? Color me shocked.
- aficionado 6y agoWhy are they regulating only AI? They should wide the spectrum of the regulation and include, for example, graph theory, combinatorics, probability theory, etc and any other branch of discrete mathematics or even mathematics and statistics in general. They look like pretty good tools to perpetrate those crimes too. Or, wait, are those “practices” even classified as crimes but current laws? How many people and organizations were fined or incarcerated for those last year? Let’s suppose they are. If someone commits one of those crimes hardcoding a system or simply using some random generator, or simply sending handwritten letters will this regulation apply? I really wonder how many AI-based systems the people proposing this regulation have really built.
- raverbashing 6y agoThe regulation includes things like "specialist systems" so yes, "graph theory, combinatorics, probability theory" on that context counts as "AI" (this is in TFA)
- skwb 6y agoWhen I first saw this going around before seeing it on here, my first thought that it's still a bad take because how else are you form your inference without data collection? You're not just going to be given your conditional probability; you're almost certainly going to have to go out to collect the data to construct this (and the data collection being the regulatory item covered). I think that the hot take machines that are twitter/online communities have a certain amount of mindrot where poorly researched topics make headline news concerns me (which tbf is in itself a hot take I suppose).
- tpmx 6y agoWas this where you first saw it? Not many Twitter hits for "eu bayesian estimation". https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1385960305663090689 https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1385960305663090689
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Hermel 6y agoThe problem with all these EU regulations is that they are overly detailed. If you have to mention "Bayesian estimation" in a document called a "directive", then you are doing something wrong. In an ideal world, a directive is a high-level document that outlines what ought to be done in broad strokes. Then, the national regulations answer some additional questions accounting for the local circumstances, but leave the fine-grained details to be filled in by legal scholars and the judicial system. In a properly setup legal system that actually honors the principle of subsidiarity, the question of whether Bayesian estimation falls under the law or not would be left to a judge who would look at it in the context of a specific case. So while the article gets a lot wrong, the author's intuition that it is wrong to mention "Bayesian estimation" in a supposedly high-level regulation is correct.
- tpmx 6y agoThe methods that in this proposal would be prohibited to use for certain pretty bad purposes reads like this: "(a) Machine learning approaches, including supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, using a wide variety of methods including deep learning; (b) Logic- and knowledge-based approaches, including knowledge representation, inductive (logic) programming, knowledge bases, inference and deductive engines, (symbolic) reasoning and expert systems; (c) Statistical approaches, Bayesian estimation, search and optimization methods." I find this (machine learning, logic/knowledge, statistics) to be pretty a pretty good definition of what they're after. The fact that very specific things are also mentioned does not seem like a red flag to me - it's the way laws are written, with examples, to give guidance to courts.
- Hermel 6y agoNo, it’s the way laws are written in a broken legal system. In a well-designed, principles-based legal system, laws are kept short and concise, with guidance and examples being provided through more suitable channels.