4 ms·

EU lawmakers take first steps toward tougher AI rules

mildmotive 3y ago
I have mixed feelings about this. Banning these technologies and then putting a few exceptions for the government isn’t an ideal solution to this problem. It feels like a power-grab. If you really want to for example tackle mass-surveillance, remove many of the cameras and reduce centralized control so that the police actually have to go and physically request recordings. But they are not doing that. I haven’t mentioned ChatGPT because this AI act seems to extend beyond just ChatGPT and as the article mentions also sets rules for facial recognition and other similarly problematic technologies.
lucumo 3y ago
> Policing tools which aim to predetermine where crimes will happen and by whom, are expected to be banned. They watched Minority Report and thought "that should get some attention." Ridiculous.
- giuliomagnifico 3y ago
  This is not so ridiculous, these technologies are already in use: “Dubai Police using AI to predict crime” (https://www.arabianbusiness.com/culture-society/dubai-police-using-ai-to-predict-crime-serious-crime-rate-down-25 https://www.arabianbusiness.com/culture-society/dubai-police...)
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    I’ve considered this as the totalitarian end result of AI. That someone of x age, y status, flies in to Dubai, goes to z set of bars after checking in to a hotel, after b time if they haven’t gone to a restaurant, is c times likely to be found at d set of brothels, with e substances. It’s all patterns, and it doesn’t matter if you participate or not, everyone else is.
  - lucumo 3y ago
    It's clearly meant to invoke thoughts of Minority Report. There's not a court in the EU that will convict someone on a prediction that they will commit a crime. Made by computer model or otherwise. So it's stupid as hell to ban it. It's already banned. And if the models are only used to know where to police, then my response is that that we've been using that for centuries now. It's called statistics, and can be as simple as bloody counting how many people lose their wallet in a busy street. Get some cops there, arrest the pick-pockets. That's a good thing, and it doesn't become "evil" just because somebody calls it "AI". But this is just politicians piggy-backing on some popular fear-mongering about some new tech. It's unlikely to go anywhere. It may be rolled out again in a few months or years when these politicians need some attention again.
    - nbaxc 3y ago
      It is not about conviction. It is about harassment and defamation, for example in the following forms: - Police stalking (legal in the Netherlands, practiced but denied in many other countries). - Police asking neighbors questions, thereby ruining your reputation. - Database sharing with e.g. the U.S., leading to further scrutiny (or denial of entry) abroad. - Not getting a government job.
- saiojd 3y ago
  I feel like you are being unfairly dismissive. Just imagine the stress of being targeted by the police because you match some criminals statistically.
- euroderf 3y ago
  It's bad enough getting profiled by the likes of Equifax or some landlord app or bank redlining. It "might" be worse getting profiled as "crime-prone". By any organisation with power over your life, public or private.
gumballindie 3y ago
Excellent news - more effort should be put into protecting intellectual property. Anything resembling original work, or training models against copyrighted work without permission, must be sanctioned. We cant have corporations steal our intellectual goods and then reselling them with different packaging.
- thallium205 3y ago
  Intellectual property is not real property.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Nothing is real property. We arent real either. It all depends on how strong the dose is.
    - thallium205 3y ago
      If I take something that deprives you of it that is theft because it’s real.
      - gumballindie 3y ago
        The theft is real and it deprives me of the very real revenue or benefit i asked for in exchange.
        thallium205 3y ago
        You are not entitled to any revenue just from some creative work. That’s a completely fake claim. You are entitled only to what you created.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        CamperBob2 3y ago
VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
It will be interesting to see what effects regulations like this will have on EU's access to emerging AI technology. We already saw Google block EU access to Bard.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
sycamoretrees 3y ago
The question is how this is really possible without a dramatic restriction of internet content accessible to citizens, i.e. national firewalls. OpenAI is accountable, but that’s only because they have something to lose. How does one reign in harmful services operating from outside the EU, who either can’t be reached or will not bother paying EU fines?
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  Don’t mistake that this may be an oversight. Do you know how the 5/14 eyes program works? By pushing EU citizens to use services overseas, they can freely be spied on. So, enact strong privacy locally, then when looking at the next generation shift, make sure you can see exactly what your citizens are doing with it. “No laws broken”.
ChainReaktion 3y ago
As always, the devil is in the details. They defined an AI system as software that uses any of: (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. That could very reasonably be interpreted to mean all software. The act is mostly concerned with high risk applications. These are based on intended use, which is obviously tricky in the context of general purpose LLM’s. Most of the covered intended uses make sense, but in combination with their definition above it could mean that, for example, any developer of EdTech software in the EU could be regulated under the act. More broadly, the act was clearly not written with general purpose foundation models in mind. For example, Article 10 requires that all training data be “relevant, representative, free of errors and complete.” That is pretty much impossible to comply with if you’re training on The Pile or similar.
- orra 3y ago
  > They defined an AI system as software that uses any of I think you have genuine concerns, but no, you misunderstand. You're not quoting the definition of an AI system. You're quoting Annex 1 (of the original draft), which defines “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TECHNIQUES AND APPROACHES referred to in Article 3, point 1”. The definition of an AI system in said Article 3 point 1 has additional requirements. Moreover, the news here is a revised draft has been made. You can see the revised definition in Article 3 on page 137. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/plmrep/COMMITTEES/CJ40/DV/2023/05-11/ConsolidatedCA_IMCOLIBE_AI_ACT_EN.pdf https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/plmrep/COM... Finally, to allay your fears, the draft legislation is proportionate: it focuses on “significant risk” and “foundation model[s]”, not every use of PyTorch.
  - hartator 3y ago
    That new definition still encompasses all software systems: ‘artificial intelligence system’ (AI system) means a machine-based system that is designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that can, for explicit or implicit objectives, generate outputs such as predictions, recommendations, or decisions that influence physical or virtual environments
pb7 3y ago
I'm waiting for the day that I read a headline about the EU producing a new and exciting product rather than regulating one.
kingstoned 3y ago
"One thing that makes me skeptical about the EU long term is the way they seem to view regulation not as an unfortunate necessity, but as an exciting project." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1050787382390329345 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1050787382390329345
- nickpp 3y ago
  The fact that they don’t seem to learn from the disastrous results of current regulation is even scarier.
  - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
    Plus, the fact that they create laws open to interpretation shows these people have no idea.
    - orra 3y ago
      This is absolute hyperbole. Does the U.S. not have a Supreme Court, and indeed other courts, for interpreting legislation?
      - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
        US is not EU. Both US and UK use a different legal system than Europe. From the EU itself: https://ec.europa.eu/dgs/legal_service/seminars/20140703_gombos_speech_en.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/dgs/legal_service/seminars/20140703_gom... > The main principles of EU law are equality before the law; legal certainty; predictable, clear and comprehensible legal provisions; and transparent legislation. 2 These principles can be upheld only if EU law has the same meaning in all language versions. “Open to interpretation” has nothing to do with the quote above. It doesn’t matter what the US has and what it does not. We’re not discussing the US here.
        orra 3y ago
        > It doesn’t matter what US has and what it does not. We’re not discussing US here. When you claim the EU “has no idea” apropos nothing—simply for having a mechanism for interpreting statues in court—it is entirely reasonable to question your double standard. All major legal jurisdictions have courts to resolve things...
kramerger 3y ago
First steps?? The special AI WG started this work years ago. Its probably just a few years younger than GDPR. The gdpr-style 6% fine has been known for 2-3 years.
bitL 3y ago
I guess once we get to 1M characters in the context window, 90% of it would be preloaded by all existing laws in order to avoid any hint of breaking the laws. In areas where two or more laws contradict each other, LLMs will behave like insane persons.
nforgerit 3y ago
German speaking. I'm seeing some defenders of this (and other EU IT regulation attempts). I used to think the same way in times of GDPR: 1. How do we as tech geeks believe that we're somewhat special and won't ever get regulated given that Software is eating the world. 2. I trust the EU and believe we should push things forward. 3. If they get it wrong, they will monitor and fix it (boy this is so cute, me 6 years ago). 4. We cannot allow anymore having BigTech invade all our industries, spy on and buy/copycat our local competition killing our economy long-term. Boy was I wrong! All we have are cookie-banners everywhere, legal insecurity and legal battles initiated by third-class law firms crawling the web for the quick buck, understaffed courts that are overwhelmed with cases and BigTech with their big law departments having almost no problem with all that; in fact it's helping them a lot. In addition, EU is already showing attempts to put even more control over its citizens, like chat control which is essentially the pipe dream of old Stasi majors and don't forget that EU people started working on a governmentally controlled DNS server, currently as an opt-in, but it's a matter of time when they will start requiring orgs and citizens to use it. 5 years from now, we will see that we didn't catch up with BigTech, we will just have local "innovators" who essentially resell Google/AWS/MS/OpenAI stuff. They will put more and more regulation pressure on their citizens "for the good" and we're just a few bad decisions away from the perfect politically controlled digital dystopia. They don't know what they're doing, and they're even excited doing it.

I have mixed feelings about this. Banning these technologies and then putting a few exceptions for the government isn’t an ideal solution to this problem. It feels like a power-grab. If you really want to for example tackle mass-surveillance, remove many of the cameras and reduce centralized control so that the police actually have to go and physically request recordings. But they are not doing that. I haven’t mentioned ChatGPT because this AI act seems to extend beyond just ChatGPT and as the article mentions also sets rules for facial recognition and other similarly problematic technologies.

lucumo 3y ago

> Policing tools which aim to predetermine where crimes will happen and by whom, are expected to be banned. They watched Minority Report and thought "that should get some attention." Ridiculous.

giuliomagnifico 3y ago
This is not so ridiculous, these technologies are already in use: “Dubai Police using AI to predict crime” (https://www.arabianbusiness.com/culture-society/dubai-police-using-ai-to-predict-crime-serious-crime-rate-down-25 https://www.arabianbusiness.com/culture-society/dubai-police...)
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  I’ve considered this as the totalitarian end result of AI. That someone of x age, y status, flies in to Dubai, goes to z set of bars after checking in to a hotel, after b time if they haven’t gone to a restaurant, is c times likely to be found at d set of brothels, with e substances. It’s all patterns, and it doesn’t matter if you participate or not, everyone else is.
- lucumo 3y ago
  It's clearly meant to invoke thoughts of Minority Report. There's not a court in the EU that will convict someone on a prediction that they will commit a crime. Made by computer model or otherwise. So it's stupid as hell to ban it. It's already banned. And if the models are only used to know where to police, then my response is that that we've been using that for centuries now. It's called statistics, and can be as simple as bloody counting how many people lose their wallet in a busy street. Get some cops there, arrest the pick-pockets. That's a good thing, and it doesn't become "evil" just because somebody calls it "AI". But this is just politicians piggy-backing on some popular fear-mongering about some new tech. It's unlikely to go anywhere. It may be rolled out again in a few months or years when these politicians need some attention again.
  - nbaxc 3y ago
    It is not about conviction. It is about harassment and defamation, for example in the following forms: - Police stalking (legal in the Netherlands, practiced but denied in many other countries). - Police asking neighbors questions, thereby ruining your reputation. - Database sharing with e.g. the U.S., leading to further scrutiny (or denial of entry) abroad. - Not getting a government job.
saiojd 3y ago
I feel like you are being unfairly dismissive. Just imagine the stress of being targeted by the police because you match some criminals statistically.
euroderf 3y ago
It's bad enough getting profiled by the likes of Equifax or some landlord app or bank redlining. It "might" be worse getting profiled as "crime-prone". By any organisation with power over your life, public or private.

gumballindie 3y ago

Excellent news - more effort should be put into protecting intellectual property. Anything resembling original work, or training models against copyrighted work without permission, must be sanctioned. We cant have corporations steal our intellectual goods and then reselling them with different packaging.

thallium205 3y ago
Intellectual property is not real property.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Nothing is real property. We arent real either. It all depends on how strong the dose is.
  - thallium205 3y ago
    If I take something that deprives you of it that is theft because it’s real.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      The theft is real and it deprives me of the very real revenue or benefit i asked for in exchange.
      - thallium205 3y ago
        You are not entitled to any revenue just from some creative work. That’s a completely fake claim. You are entitled only to what you created.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        CamperBob2 3y ago

VWWHFSfQ 3y ago

It will be interesting to see what effects regulations like this will have on EU's access to emerging AI technology. We already saw Google block EU access to Bard.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

sycamoretrees 3y ago

The question is how this is really possible without a dramatic restriction of internet content accessible to citizens, i.e. national firewalls. OpenAI is accountable, but that’s only because they have something to lose. How does one reign in harmful services operating from outside the EU, who either can’t be reached or will not bother paying EU fines?

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
Don’t mistake that this may be an oversight. Do you know how the 5/14 eyes program works? By pushing EU citizens to use services overseas, they can freely be spied on. So, enact strong privacy locally, then when looking at the next generation shift, make sure you can see exactly what your citizens are doing with it. “No laws broken”.

ChainReaktion 3y ago

As always, the devil is in the details. They defined an AI system as software that uses any of: (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. That could very reasonably be interpreted to mean all software. The act is mostly concerned with high risk applications. These are based on intended use, which is obviously tricky in the context of general purpose LLM’s. Most of the covered intended uses make sense, but in combination with their definition above it could mean that, for example, any developer of EdTech software in the EU could be regulated under the act. More broadly, the act was clearly not written with general purpose foundation models in mind. For example, Article 10 requires that all training data be “relevant, representative, free of errors and complete.” That is pretty much impossible to comply with if you’re training on The Pile or similar.

orra 3y ago
> They defined an AI system as software that uses any of I think you have genuine concerns, but no, you misunderstand. You're not quoting the definition of an AI system. You're quoting Annex 1 (of the original draft), which defines “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TECHNIQUES AND APPROACHES referred to in Article 3, point 1”. The definition of an AI system in said Article 3 point 1 has additional requirements. Moreover, the news here is a revised draft has been made. You can see the revised definition in Article 3 on page 137. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/plmrep/COMMITTEES/CJ40/DV/2023/05-11/ConsolidatedCA_IMCOLIBE_AI_ACT_EN.pdf https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/plmrep/COM... Finally, to allay your fears, the draft legislation is proportionate: it focuses on “significant risk” and “foundation model[s]”, not every use of PyTorch.
- hartator 3y ago
  That new definition still encompasses all software systems: ‘artificial intelligence system’ (AI system) means a machine-based system that is designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that can, for explicit or implicit objectives, generate outputs such as predictions, recommendations, or decisions that influence physical or virtual environments

pb7 3y ago

I'm waiting for the day that I read a headline about the EU producing a new and exciting product rather than regulating one.

kingstoned 3y ago

"One thing that makes me skeptical about the EU long term is the way they seem to view regulation not as an unfortunate necessity, but as an exciting project." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1050787382390329345 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1050787382390329345

nickpp 3y ago
The fact that they don’t seem to learn from the disastrous results of current regulation is even scarier.
- rad_gruchalski 3y ago
  Plus, the fact that they create laws open to interpretation shows these people have no idea.
  - orra 3y ago
    This is absolute hyperbole. Does the U.S. not have a Supreme Court, and indeed other courts, for interpreting legislation?
    - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
      US is not EU. Both US and UK use a different legal system than Europe. From the EU itself: https://ec.europa.eu/dgs/legal_service/seminars/20140703_gombos_speech_en.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/dgs/legal_service/seminars/20140703_gom... > The main principles of EU law are equality before the law; legal certainty; predictable, clear and comprehensible legal provisions; and transparent legislation. 2 These principles can be upheld only if EU law has the same meaning in all language versions. “Open to interpretation” has nothing to do with the quote above. It doesn’t matter what the US has and what it does not. We’re not discussing the US here.
      - orra 3y ago
        > It doesn’t matter what US has and what it does not. We’re not discussing US here. When you claim the EU “has no idea” apropos nothing—simply for having a mechanism for interpreting statues in court—it is entirely reasonable to question your double standard. All major legal jurisdictions have courts to resolve things...

kramerger 3y ago

First steps?? The special AI WG started this work years ago. Its probably just a few years younger than GDPR. The gdpr-style 6% fine has been known for 2-3 years.

bitL 3y ago

I guess once we get to 1M characters in the context window, 90% of it would be preloaded by all existing laws in order to avoid any hint of breaking the laws. In areas where two or more laws contradict each other, LLMs will behave like insane persons.

nforgerit 3y ago

German speaking. I'm seeing some defenders of this (and other EU IT regulation attempts). I used to think the same way in times of GDPR: 1. How do we as tech geeks believe that we're somewhat special and won't ever get regulated given that Software is eating the world. 2. I trust the EU and believe we should push things forward. 3. If they get it wrong, they will monitor and fix it (boy this is so cute, me 6 years ago). 4. We cannot allow anymore having BigTech invade all our industries, spy on and buy/copycat our local competition killing our economy long-term. Boy was I wrong! All we have are cookie-banners everywhere, legal insecurity and legal battles initiated by third-class law firms crawling the web for the quick buck, understaffed courts that are overwhelmed with cases and BigTech with their big law departments having almost no problem with all that; in fact it's helping them a lot. In addition, EU is already showing attempts to put even more control over its citizens, like chat control which is essentially the pipe dream of old Stasi majors and don't forget that EU people started working on a governmentally controlled DNS server, currently as an opt-in, but it's a matter of time when they will start requiring orgs and citizens to use it. 5 years from now, we will see that we didn't catch up with BigTech, we will just have local "innovators" who essentially resell Google/AWS/MS/OpenAI stuff. They will put more and more regulation pressure on their citizens "for the good" and we're just a few bad decisions away from the perfect politically controlled digital dystopia. They don't know what they're doing, and they're even excited doing it.