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In general I find the EU AI act quite reasonable. There are a couple AI uses that will be prohibited (most mentioned by the article, mostly manipulating people

In general I find the EU AI act quite reasonable. There are a couple AI uses that will be prohibited (most mentioned by the article, mostly manipulating people or dystopian government stuff). But imho the meat of the act is in categorizing many use cases as "High Risk", which comes with a list of requirements. Things like putting some effort in thinking about risks, into your training data, understanding biases, having documentation and logging, options for manual intervention etc. Most of it wouldn't be out of place in a best-practices guide for deploying AI models (even though obviously most of it is extremely high level)

konschubert 4y ago
The effect is going to be that all the innovation happens elsewhere, big AI companies will develop outside Europe. And Europeans will only get to benefit as consumers, not as makers of AI. And the EU will take that as a reason to regulate even harder and then also somehow end up giving a bunch of money to its telcos. EDIT: My point is that regulation doesn’t just prevent “bad products”. The compliance overhead also prevents good products. That being said, I agree that there are certain decisions and actions that always should require a human appeals process
- cschmid 4y ago
  The only way to avoid falling under the provisions of the act is to not have any customers in the EU -- that's quite a big market to cut yourself out of, and definitely something a big company cannot afford to do.
- gumballindie 4y ago
  I am pretty sure that regardless of where you are if you sell a product in the eu that violates eu law you will be fined. Furthermore you may be banned from selling in the eu all together. Meaning legit ai companies in the eu will flourish while ai companies not following the rules will miss out on the richest market. So in effect the eu is protecting it’s citizens work from theft and companies from unethical competition.
  - konschubert 4y ago
    Big companies can afford regulations. They will do just fine with writing all the compliance documents But Small companies can’t afford the compliance overhead. And big companies can only develop out of small companies. So they will develop elsewhere
    - gumballindie 4y ago
      They said the same about GDPR and is working fine. If a company crosses me I just request data removal and call it a day. It's all good. I do hate GDPR popups tho.
      - endisneigh 4y ago
        by what metric is it working fine?
        hef19898 4y ago
        Yes. Sorry, I mean most of them metrics.
      - anonylizard 4y ago
        Yeah, and now where is the privacy respecting European tech giant? Europe has fallen farther and farther behind in tech, every single year, and are now completely crushingly behind in AI. Like the only (continential) European AI company I know of is DeepL, and DeepL will soon be in DeepSh-t if GPT-4 costs go down.
        gumballindie 4y ago
        The privacy respecting european tech giant is the citizen. Also there is significant contribution to ai coming from the old world, some of the most brilliant minds are from here. And whats the point in having gazzilionaire corporations with offices surrounded by tents and poverty? Where’s the progress in that?
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  > ...and then also somehow end up giving a bunch of money to its telcos. A funny but probably true prediction. Brussels loves handing money to PTTs the way the US Congress loves handing it out to Raytheon.
- PoignardAzur 4y ago
  > The effect is going to be that all the innovation happens elsewhere, big AI companies will develop outside Europe. Why though? Like, most of the requirements listed in the AI act seem extremely reasonable and low-overhead, if not seriously meek. Given the immense budgets AI labs can call upon, why would "having to fill a form that says you made sure the AI wasn't racist" be a disqualifying factor?
  - konschubert 4y ago
    Let’s see how much effort the compliance is. Just having to know about it is a burden for a small startup.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      It propably is, based on how many of those small, VC backed start-ups, complain about, I don't know, the burden of properly declaring taxes, paying social security for their properly registered employees and so on.
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        How many do complain about that?
        hef19898 4y ago
        In Germany? A lot, apparently a RSU or ESOP program is to hard to set-up, paying higher base salaries out of the question, so they complain about zheir inability to allow their "worker" participate on the company "success", mostly as a diversion from the fact that they just don't want to. Or taxes, something impossible to do for a new, academic / SW engineer led start-up to do in Germany. It is so bad, if you delieve people, that for that reason alone companies move abroad. All BS of course, given howany small businesses without the reasources of a VC backed start-up, actually manage to do so day in day out. The list goes on...
        4y ago
- Taywee 4y ago
  Yeah, like food safety regulations, other places still won't abide. It's not like "other places still will allow abuse of their citizens" is a great argument for us to as well. Safety regulations exist in every major industry, and sometimes it slows some progress for the sake of individuals. This isn't a bad thing.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    I don't know why people compare software regulation to the regulation of physical things that do obvious harm like food regulations.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Considering how much software actually export controlled under, e.g. ITAR (coming from the US by the way), your point is?
    - braveyellowtoad 4y ago
      Could you please clarify: is your position that software is not capable of doing harm?
      - endisneigh 4y ago
        Yes, most software is harmless. There are some scenarios where it could do harm, but ultimately said harm was the product of human usage of the software, not software inherently. There are a few examples such as medical device software and things like train software where honest mistakes can result in human harm. However even with those the issue was that humans made the mistakes. Software development as a discipline certainly needs more rigor like the other engineering disciplines. However the AI act is premature since AI ultimately is an implementation detail for a variety of use-cases, that should be regulated independently, not AI. Regulating AI in general is like regulating electrons. If the EU has an issue with AI potentially resulting in more misinformation, then regulate the types of sites, that is social media, that would be the vector for such spread. I'm open to counterexamples outside those class of examples.
- AndyMcConachie 4y ago
  Fine. Promoting innovation as an ideologiy has become camouflage for mass exploitation. Most 'innovation' that happens in SV is either advertising nonsense or so new trick to avoid labor laws. I've lived in both the USA and The Netherlands and I now live in The Netherlands. I recently had to renew my Dutch driver's license and the entire process so painless and quick. Compared to my experiences doing the same thing in both Virginia and California it was a lovely breeze. That's progress. That's innovation. Don't even get me started on the byzantine nonsense that is the IRS versus the Belastingdienst. I'll take the Belastingdienst any day. Americans wouldn't know real innovation if a walkable neighborhood arrived on a highspeed train and began eliminating healthcare bureaucracy.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > Americans wouldn't know real innovation if a walkable neighborhood arrived on a highspeed train and began eliminating healthcare bureaucracy. Thanks for the laugh, beautifully put. In general I agree with your point, Americans hyperfocus on certain types of innovation (reinventing this or that wheel, "revolutionising X", like every single bullshit "reinventing transportation" "like a train, but much worse" proposal out there), mistake everything else for lack of innovation, and totally miss the forrest for the trees. New and different stuff is celebrated, even if it's an obvious disaster in the making for most involved (e.g. Uber destroying labour protections, Airbnb putting immense pressure on already stressed housing markets, idiots reinventing trains but worse with "pods"). Meanwhile American companies are drastically behind in many niches (airplanes, cars, trains, railroad companies, cosmetics, etc.), but you don't hear Americans complain for their lack of innovation. But when anything EU is mentioned "innovation is dead, Deutsche Telekom is so old and just sucking Brussels money". When Intel gets subsidies to manage to catch up to the competition because they stagnated it's strategic, but when EU funds go for anything it's handouts propping up failing industries.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      I think the big difference is the US is customer-focused, and the EU is employee-focused. To be stereotypical: in the US organisations exist to provide value people choose to pay for (e.g. electric cars; cheap rocketry; cheaper accommodation for travel; cheaper and much more convenient taxis); in the EU they exist to employ people, and hopefully they provide value, but if they don't provide much it's fine because it's pretty difficult to start a competitor anyway.
- wokwokwok 4y ago
  ? Do you think there’s some kind of karmic point scoring system that you win by being the first one to build horrible unethical dystopian AI models? Or are you just complaining you won’t be able to horrifically exploit people using them to make lots of money? …because, sure, red tape is bad, but is it ultimately that terrible not being a allowed to be super villain? “But America has super villains! …! We’re being left behind…” Ok… um. Yeah… I’m ok with that. Please don’t try to be a super villain. These laws don’t seem nearly as outrageous as you make them out to be.
  - AndrewKemendo 4y ago
    >Or are you just complaining you won’t be able to horrifically exploit people using them to make lots of money? Having watched this new brand of "AI" capitalists behave, that's exactly what they want to do with it
  - dragonelite 4y ago
    Well you need patents and those patents will be created and registered in the US or China this way. Kind of like how EU car manufacturers have been sleeping on the EV movement. Now they have to source their parts from Chinese manufacturers. So wealth is leaking(patent costs etc) out of Europe and the continent will have less wealth in total over time. Especially now that the cheap Russian energy they had access too is going to their manufacturing rival China and it will also boost Indian development manufacturing. Brussels is doing everything in their power to deindustrialise and make Europe less competitive on the global market..
    - nozzlegear 4y ago
      Wouldn’t those patents be for things the EU sees as unethical anyway, and therefore something they shouldn’t build? Or do you mean the rest of the world might use these unethical, super-villainy means to discover and patent totally normal things that they might want to use in the EU as well? > Kind of like how EU car manufacturers have been sleeping on the EV movement. Now they have to source their parts from Chinese manufacturers. Do we know that’s actually because they weren’t able to innovate on their own due to Brussels regulation, or some other factor?
- aqme28 4y ago
  Would you say the same things about FDA regulations? As a programmer who used to work on medical devices, these sound pretty similar like the FDA regulations we dealt with. The goal isn't to stifle innovation, it's to keep scammers and crooks out of the market and make things better for everyone. The EU doesn't want another Thalidomide, and the US shouldn't want another Theranos.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Sometimes it feels like allowing scammers and crooks is kind of the goal, isn't it?
    - renjimen 4y ago
      What? I don’t follow the logic. How could regulation in favour of protecting the rights of citizens over corporations be intentionally facilitating scammers?
      - hef19898 4y ago
        I meant that being to scam people is an actual goal of people opossing rwgulations like the discussed AI act or GDPR. Or financial regulations, the whole crypto space, last weeks over hyped society saving tech, is built on the assumption financial reulations don't apply to crypto. I am all in favor of reasonable, individual rights protecting regulation. The EU AI act might just be one, as is GDPR.
        renjimen 4y ago
        Ah, sorry. I guess I misunderstood. Thanks for clarifying!
  - konschubert 4y ago
    I am not calling to abolish all regulation. But please consider this: How many people’s lives could have been saved if FDA regulations didn’t make medical approvals take 10 years? How many life-saving medications could have been invented if the cost of approval didn’t limit innovation to the biggest companies?
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  >The effect is going to be that all the innovation happens elsewhere, big AI companies will develop outside Europe. The EU has rules for aircraft and automobile manufacturing and yet Airbus and Ferrari seem to be able to continue to be world leaders in their fields. Moreover, there are very few restrictions on many industries in Somalia, yet for some reason it fails to be a hub of innovation. Regulations don’t immediately mean a flight of intellectual capability to less restrictive places.
  - csomar 4y ago
    > Regulations don’t immediately mean a flight of intellectual capability to less restrictive places. This. Most people forget that the US is still a highly regulated place. And the tech hub (California/Bay Area) is a highly-taxed and highly-bureaucratic area too... It's not deregulation or investment. Innovative economies are like emergent behavior. They spring out of chaos and no one has no understanding so far how that happens.
  - konschubert 4y ago
    I am not arguing for zero regulation. I’m saying you have to consider the price of regulation. Airbus is able to compete in the airliner market because it’s a huge incumbent. Maybe this is the price we have to pay for safe planes. But there is almost zero competition in the airline manufacturing sector because the regulation is keeping out any potential competition.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
The EU AI act is more for protecting people from being exploited by companies and institutions and having AI take the fall. Basically what they're trying to prevent, is that you can't deny someone welfare, or an insurance claim, or a close their bank account with the justification that "computer says NO"[1]. For every such decision, a human should be at the wheel who can bring a legal fitting justification and be responsible for it. [1] https://youtu.be/x0YGZPycMEU?t=8 https://youtu.be/x0YGZPycMEU?t=8
- btbuildem 4y ago
  That seems like a very reasonable stance. AI is a tool like any other, the entities with agency that use it are still people.
logicchains 4y ago
>New transparency and risk assessment requirements for providers of (generative) foundation models like GTP Anyone following the space would be aware that there's currently a huge Cambrian explosion of innovation in foundation models going on. Something like this, requiring you to go through a bunch of potentially expensive bureaucracy would completely kill this growth in the EU, to the benefit of the larger players.

konschubert 4y ago

The effect is going to be that all the innovation happens elsewhere, big AI companies will develop outside Europe. And Europeans will only get to benefit as consumers, not as makers of AI. And the EU will take that as a reason to regulate even harder and then also somehow end up giving a bunch of money to its telcos. EDIT: My point is that regulation doesn’t just prevent “bad products”. The compliance overhead also prevents good products. That being said, I agree that there are certain decisions and actions that always should require a human appeals process

cschmid 4y ago
The only way to avoid falling under the provisions of the act is to not have any customers in the EU -- that's quite a big market to cut yourself out of, and definitely something a big company cannot afford to do.
gumballindie 4y ago
I am pretty sure that regardless of where you are if you sell a product in the eu that violates eu law you will be fined. Furthermore you may be banned from selling in the eu all together. Meaning legit ai companies in the eu will flourish while ai companies not following the rules will miss out on the richest market. So in effect the eu is protecting it’s citizens work from theft and companies from unethical competition.
- konschubert 4y ago
  Big companies can afford regulations. They will do just fine with writing all the compliance documents But Small companies can’t afford the compliance overhead. And big companies can only develop out of small companies. So they will develop elsewhere
  - gumballindie 4y ago
    They said the same about GDPR and is working fine. If a company crosses me I just request data removal and call it a day. It's all good. I do hate GDPR popups tho.
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      by what metric is it working fine?
      - hef19898 4y ago
        Yes. Sorry, I mean most of them metrics.
    - anonylizard 4y ago
      Yeah, and now where is the privacy respecting European tech giant? Europe has fallen farther and farther behind in tech, every single year, and are now completely crushingly behind in AI. Like the only (continential) European AI company I know of is DeepL, and DeepL will soon be in DeepSh-t if GPT-4 costs go down.
      - gumballindie 4y ago
        The privacy respecting european tech giant is the citizen. Also there is significant contribution to ai coming from the old world, some of the most brilliant minds are from here. And whats the point in having gazzilionaire corporations with offices surrounded by tents and poverty? Where’s the progress in that?
ElevenLathe 4y ago
> ...and then also somehow end up giving a bunch of money to its telcos. A funny but probably true prediction. Brussels loves handing money to PTTs the way the US Congress loves handing it out to Raytheon.
PoignardAzur 4y ago
> The effect is going to be that all the innovation happens elsewhere, big AI companies will develop outside Europe. Why though? Like, most of the requirements listed in the AI act seem extremely reasonable and low-overhead, if not seriously meek. Given the immense budgets AI labs can call upon, why would "having to fill a form that says you made sure the AI wasn't racist" be a disqualifying factor?
- konschubert 4y ago
  Let’s see how much effort the compliance is. Just having to know about it is a burden for a small startup.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    It propably is, based on how many of those small, VC backed start-ups, complain about, I don't know, the burden of properly declaring taxes, paying social security for their properly registered employees and so on.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      How many do complain about that?
      - hef19898 4y ago
        In Germany? A lot, apparently a RSU or ESOP program is to hard to set-up, paying higher base salaries out of the question, so they complain about zheir inability to allow their "worker" participate on the company "success", mostly as a diversion from the fact that they just don't want to. Or taxes, something impossible to do for a new, academic / SW engineer led start-up to do in Germany. It is so bad, if you delieve people, that for that reason alone companies move abroad. All BS of course, given howany small businesses without the reasources of a VC backed start-up, actually manage to do so day in day out. The list goes on...
        4y ago
Taywee 4y ago
Yeah, like food safety regulations, other places still won't abide. It's not like "other places still will allow abuse of their citizens" is a great argument for us to as well. Safety regulations exist in every major industry, and sometimes it slows some progress for the sake of individuals. This isn't a bad thing.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  I don't know why people compare software regulation to the regulation of physical things that do obvious harm like food regulations.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Considering how much software actually export controlled under, e.g. ITAR (coming from the US by the way), your point is?
  - braveyellowtoad 4y ago
    Could you please clarify: is your position that software is not capable of doing harm?
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      Yes, most software is harmless. There are some scenarios where it could do harm, but ultimately said harm was the product of human usage of the software, not software inherently. There are a few examples such as medical device software and things like train software where honest mistakes can result in human harm. However even with those the issue was that humans made the mistakes. Software development as a discipline certainly needs more rigor like the other engineering disciplines. However the AI act is premature since AI ultimately is an implementation detail for a variety of use-cases, that should be regulated independently, not AI. Regulating AI in general is like regulating electrons. If the EU has an issue with AI potentially resulting in more misinformation, then regulate the types of sites, that is social media, that would be the vector for such spread. I'm open to counterexamples outside those class of examples.
AndyMcConachie 4y ago
Fine. Promoting innovation as an ideologiy has become camouflage for mass exploitation. Most 'innovation' that happens in SV is either advertising nonsense or so new trick to avoid labor laws. I've lived in both the USA and The Netherlands and I now live in The Netherlands. I recently had to renew my Dutch driver's license and the entire process so painless and quick. Compared to my experiences doing the same thing in both Virginia and California it was a lovely breeze. That's progress. That's innovation. Don't even get me started on the byzantine nonsense that is the IRS versus the Belastingdienst. I'll take the Belastingdienst any day. Americans wouldn't know real innovation if a walkable neighborhood arrived on a highspeed train and began eliminating healthcare bureaucracy.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > Americans wouldn't know real innovation if a walkable neighborhood arrived on a highspeed train and began eliminating healthcare bureaucracy. Thanks for the laugh, beautifully put. In general I agree with your point, Americans hyperfocus on certain types of innovation (reinventing this or that wheel, "revolutionising X", like every single bullshit "reinventing transportation" "like a train, but much worse" proposal out there), mistake everything else for lack of innovation, and totally miss the forrest for the trees. New and different stuff is celebrated, even if it's an obvious disaster in the making for most involved (e.g. Uber destroying labour protections, Airbnb putting immense pressure on already stressed housing markets, idiots reinventing trains but worse with "pods"). Meanwhile American companies are drastically behind in many niches (airplanes, cars, trains, railroad companies, cosmetics, etc.), but you don't hear Americans complain for their lack of innovation. But when anything EU is mentioned "innovation is dead, Deutsche Telekom is so old and just sucking Brussels money". When Intel gets subsidies to manage to catch up to the competition because they stagnated it's strategic, but when EU funds go for anything it's handouts propping up failing industries.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I think the big difference is the US is customer-focused, and the EU is employee-focused. To be stereotypical: in the US organisations exist to provide value people choose to pay for (e.g. electric cars; cheap rocketry; cheaper accommodation for travel; cheaper and much more convenient taxis); in the EU they exist to employ people, and hopefully they provide value, but if they don't provide much it's fine because it's pretty difficult to start a competitor anyway.
wokwokwok 4y ago
? Do you think there’s some kind of karmic point scoring system that you win by being the first one to build horrible unethical dystopian AI models? Or are you just complaining you won’t be able to horrifically exploit people using them to make lots of money? …because, sure, red tape is bad, but is it ultimately that terrible not being a allowed to be super villain? “But America has super villains! …! We’re being left behind…” Ok… um. Yeah… I’m ok with that. Please don’t try to be a super villain. These laws don’t seem nearly as outrageous as you make them out to be.
- AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  >Or are you just complaining you won’t be able to horrifically exploit people using them to make lots of money? Having watched this new brand of "AI" capitalists behave, that's exactly what they want to do with it
- dragonelite 4y ago
  Well you need patents and those patents will be created and registered in the US or China this way. Kind of like how EU car manufacturers have been sleeping on the EV movement. Now they have to source their parts from Chinese manufacturers. So wealth is leaking(patent costs etc) out of Europe and the continent will have less wealth in total over time. Especially now that the cheap Russian energy they had access too is going to their manufacturing rival China and it will also boost Indian development manufacturing. Brussels is doing everything in their power to deindustrialise and make Europe less competitive on the global market..
  - nozzlegear 4y ago
    Wouldn’t those patents be for things the EU sees as unethical anyway, and therefore something they shouldn’t build? Or do you mean the rest of the world might use these unethical, super-villainy means to discover and patent totally normal things that they might want to use in the EU as well? > Kind of like how EU car manufacturers have been sleeping on the EV movement. Now they have to source their parts from Chinese manufacturers. Do we know that’s actually because they weren’t able to innovate on their own due to Brussels regulation, or some other factor?
aqme28 4y ago
Would you say the same things about FDA regulations? As a programmer who used to work on medical devices, these sound pretty similar like the FDA regulations we dealt with. The goal isn't to stifle innovation, it's to keep scammers and crooks out of the market and make things better for everyone. The EU doesn't want another Thalidomide, and the US shouldn't want another Theranos.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Sometimes it feels like allowing scammers and crooks is kind of the goal, isn't it?
  - renjimen 4y ago
    What? I don’t follow the logic. How could regulation in favour of protecting the rights of citizens over corporations be intentionally facilitating scammers?
    - hef19898 4y ago
      I meant that being to scam people is an actual goal of people opossing rwgulations like the discussed AI act or GDPR. Or financial regulations, the whole crypto space, last weeks over hyped society saving tech, is built on the assumption financial reulations don't apply to crypto. I am all in favor of reasonable, individual rights protecting regulation. The EU AI act might just be one, as is GDPR.
      - renjimen 4y ago
        Ah, sorry. I guess I misunderstood. Thanks for clarifying!
- konschubert 4y ago
  I am not calling to abolish all regulation. But please consider this: How many people’s lives could have been saved if FDA regulations didn’t make medical approvals take 10 years? How many life-saving medications could have been invented if the cost of approval didn’t limit innovation to the biggest companies?
alasdair_ 4y ago
>The effect is going to be that all the innovation happens elsewhere, big AI companies will develop outside Europe. The EU has rules for aircraft and automobile manufacturing and yet Airbus and Ferrari seem to be able to continue to be world leaders in their fields. Moreover, there are very few restrictions on many industries in Somalia, yet for some reason it fails to be a hub of innovation. Regulations don’t immediately mean a flight of intellectual capability to less restrictive places.
- csomar 4y ago
  > Regulations don’t immediately mean a flight of intellectual capability to less restrictive places. This. Most people forget that the US is still a highly regulated place. And the tech hub (California/Bay Area) is a highly-taxed and highly-bureaucratic area too... It's not deregulation or investment. Innovative economies are like emergent behavior. They spring out of chaos and no one has no understanding so far how that happens.
- konschubert 4y ago
  I am not arguing for zero regulation. I’m saying you have to consider the price of regulation. Airbus is able to compete in the airliner market because it’s a huge incumbent. Maybe this is the price we have to pay for safe planes. But there is almost zero competition in the airline manufacturing sector because the regulation is keeping out any potential competition.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

The EU AI act is more for protecting people from being exploited by companies and institutions and having AI take the fall. Basically what they're trying to prevent, is that you can't deny someone welfare, or an insurance claim, or a close their bank account with the justification that "computer says NO"[1]. For every such decision, a human should be at the wheel who can bring a legal fitting justification and be responsible for it. [1] https://youtu.be/x0YGZPycMEU?t=8 https://youtu.be/x0YGZPycMEU?t=8

btbuildem 4y ago
That seems like a very reasonable stance. AI is a tool like any other, the entities with agency that use it are still people.

logicchains 4y ago

>New transparency and risk assessment requirements for providers of (generative) foundation models like GTP Anyone following the space would be aware that there's currently a huge Cambrian explosion of innovation in foundation models going on. Something like this, requiring you to go through a bunch of potentially expensive bureaucracy would completely kill this growth in the EU, to the benefit of the larger players.