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> By 2022, there were examples that AI was actively harming people. In a Dutch scandal, decisions made by algorithms were linked to families being forcibly sepa
by miohtama 3y ago
> By 2022, there were examples that AI was actively harming people. In a Dutch scandal, decisions made by algorithms were linked to families being forcibly separated from their children, while students studying remotely alleged that AI systems discriminated against them based on the color of their skin.
These were not AIs but rule-based systems with if elses. The current legislation is bad, because it tries to regulate the technology, not how it is used. Dutch government people should be responsible for the decisions they or their system produces, AI or no AI.
- bannedbybros 3y ago[dead]
- phh 3y ago> The current legislation is bad, because it tries to regulate the technology, not how it is used. That's not what the EU regulation does. As an example, High Risk Machine Translation will be regulated no matter how you do it. The standard underlying the EU's AI Act explicit mention that AI system can be anything from rule-based to machine learning and mention some other AI methods. The regulation is on task/usage not on the technology. Edit: "High Risk" in my example refers to the usage
- miohtama 3y agoThank you for the clarification!
- robertlagrant 3y ago> AI system can be anything from rule-based to machine learning Then why call it AI?
- osullip 3y agoWhy call anything AI? It's become commonly accepted to mean any algorithmic system. It's probably better to use an accepted umbrella term rather than multiple specific scientific ones in this case.
- zlg_codes 3y agoFuzzy and misused words are pushed to muddy the semantics. Actual AI doesn't exist. If/else, case, and while statements are basic building blocks of automation and computational logic. Intelligence is far from anything we've done with computers. It is a parlor trick looking for money right now.
- mcpackieh 3y ago> Actual AI doesn't exist. The word "actual" is doing a lot of lifting there. Artificial intelligence has existed for decades. Presumably you mean "artificial general intelligence", whatever that's even supposed to mean (it's subjective, and for many people it's a matter of literal religious faith that humans have something called souls which machines can never possibly emulate, and therefore "actual AI" is literally impossible as far as they're concerned.) Well anyway... if you want to say AGI, just say AGI. AI is more general than that and the term is well established to encompass a great many methods and kinds of systems. Many kinds of AI are very primitive and seem trivial today; they are nonetheless "actual AI".
- zlg_codes 3y agoI will not bend to the sloppy use of words to misrepresent technology. My words are not your putty to mold.
- osullip 3y agoI get what you are saying. With a technical audience, it is better to use actual terminology. However the general public does not have the knowledge to understand these. These are the people using ChatGPT and for them it is AI. We can correct them, but it's likely they won't care.
- slowmovintarget 3y agoThe general public is being misled with overwrought appeals to emotion and misused terms applied in a deliberately overbroad manner. AI may contain algorithms but an algorithm is not AI. Social media feed algorithms are bad, and the public is awakening to the damage they cause. But they are not AI. As Yan LeCun pointed out recently, AI is actually the solution to the problems created by "algorithms."
- pas 3y agoIntelligence is the capability to form (predictive) models (to solve problems through evaluating strategies through the aforementioned model). General intelligence is the ability to do it over an arbitrary range of problems. Even an if-else tree is a model. Building the model based on data leads to high predictive power. AI is an okay term for this IMHO.
- yallneedtoget 3y ago[dead]
- mcpackieh 3y ago"If-else rule-based systems" aka expert systems are an example of symbolic artificial intelligence e.g. "Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence". Just because it doesn't use the newest most trendy methods doesn't mean it isn't AI, and even if you object to applying the AI label to these kind of systems, these systems are nevertheless valid targets for regulation. "Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOFAI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOFAI "In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert.[1] Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as if–then rules" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system "Symbolic AI used tools such as logic programming, production rules, semantic nets and frames, and it developed applications such as knowledge-based systems (in particular, expert systems), [...]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligen...
- ppaattrriicckk 3y agoBecause "AI" is a well-established academic field, and the definition by your quoted comment is in line with this. It's a very broad umbrella term, machine (and deep) learning are only subsets - although the main drivers these days.
- drtgh 3y agoMarketing. An acronym with the word "statistics" would not have been able to sell the false sense of precision or superior deduction or the 'entity able to think' that is implied by putting "AI" in the sentence. Such marketing is hijacking what the general public has come to know over the past two centuries as AI through sci-fi novels and films, which now they wants to be rename to Artificial General Intelligence, AGI ? One would expect they edit all the sci-fi novels and movies around the history for to avoid the AI acronym confusion, but in such case the marketing would stop being effective, because the quid is within my first sentence, they sell the false sense of precision or superior deduction, when in fact there are only statistical models. Pure oxymoron, as statistics in itself sounds like an acronym for "lack of precision".
- robertlagrant 3y agoThis is sort of my point - one of the options is "rule based system". That doesn't need to be statistical at all. It doesn't look like what people would think of as AI at all. I don't see why it isn't just "you can't use computers for this" and AI is an implementation detail.
- dkersten 3y ago> It doesn't look like what people would think of as AI at all. If by “people” you mean specifically the subset of people who have technical knowledge or who read HN, then sure, but in the wider population, anything that seems intelligent that’s fine by a computer is AI, they don’t care if it’s using statistical techniques, a random number generator or a bunch of conditionals. Laypeople don’t know or care what happens under the hood. I once heard a conversation between an old boss of mine and an investor where my boss was saying that the software did calculations X and Y automatically and the investor responded with “so it’s AI”. My thought was “wait what? No it’s not” but my boss said something like “AI is anything that people perceive as intelligence thats artificial”. Historically, exist systems were seen as AI and they weren’t necessarily statistics based. That’s why we have more technical terms like machine learning. But I agree, that laws should be far more specific about what they mean and “you can use a computer for this” would be better.m, if that’s what they really mean.
- FatCat1978 3y ago[flagged]
- Someone 3y agoBecause that’s what it has been called since the term was coined in the 1950s. I think its meaning may be shifting, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning#Artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning#Artificial_in... still shows it as a broader term than “machine learning”, including expert systems. Also note that decision tree learning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_tree_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_tree_learning) basically is a search for a good rule-based system.
- krageon 3y agoBecause an expert system is an AI
- zulban 3y agoBecause it's still AI. If I write a simple program "if black, no scholarship" it should still face the same regulations as the latest LLM evaluating scholarships.
- Dalewyn 3y agoWhat we call "AI" today we called algorithms yesteryear and applications yesterdecade. It's all marketing, I think EU is right to accurately use the "AI" marketing term for what it is.
- phh 3y ago> It's all marketing, I think EU is right to accurately use the "AI" marketing term for what it is. I think EU calling it "AI" is fine today. I'm more worried about the future. In 5 years when the hype word for this class of tools becomes Tchounka. The world will say that EU is late and they need to pass a Tchounka law. While the reality is that EU passed an automated data processing law and doesn't care about how it's done.
- troupo 3y ago> In 5 years when the hype word for this class of tools becomes Tchounka. You could read Annex I of the law which details what EU calls AI instead of speculating. And yes, if some new way comes along the law can, and will be, amended
- mewpmewp2 3y agoAI has always been used to describe plain algorithmical things as well. See video games for example. But ultimately everything in life can be thought of as algorithm so it really doesn't matter. If it's artificial and it can solve problems beyond simple computations, it is AI. Humans are algorithms as well, just very complex and nuanced ones that we have a lot of trouble reverse engineering. I would say that a complex hardcoded algorithm that is used for a racing game is a stronger AI than a simple, small neural network for one specific narrow task. Intelligence = ability to solve problems, AI = something that is artificial and can solve problems beyond being a simple tool.
- fuglede_ 3y agoSounds what something someone might want to call an expert system? > In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert.[1] Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as if–then rules rather than through conventional procedural code
- martingoodson 3y agoDo you have any reference for this claim, or are you guessing? It was reported that the algorithm was a Gradient Boosting Machine by investigators who gained access to the code. https://www.lighthousereports.com/suspicion-machines-methodology/ https://www.lighthousereports.com/suspicion-machines-methodo...
- alach11 3y agoWell if you torture the analogy enough, you could argue a tree based model is a lot of if/else statements!
- GuB-42 3y agoAccording to the EU proposal, this is what they mean by AI: (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. So rule-based systems (b) are considered AI for the sake of regulation.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mikojan 3y agoAren't all current machine learning approaches statistical approaches using Bayesian estimation?
- dpflan 3y agoWhat do you mean by “current”?
- kevindamm 3y agoNot really.. they're often statistically based, but don't need to use Bayes' Theorem or be based on a Bayes Network. They are driven by expectation maximization and stochastic gradient descent, mainly. An autodifferentiation back-propagates the parameter update through a neural network model, but the network doesn't necessarily represent a Bayes Network.
- krageon 3y agoIf that were the case, that wouldn't be just one of the covered concepts in the proposed law. We should not assume world-shaking incompetence.
- soulofmischief 3y agoSo every program ever made?
- aprilthird2021 3y agoI agree with your point the users are at fault, not the technology itself. It's the govt which was separating families wrongly and the schools who discriminated who should suffer, not the companies making the tech. That being said, this is a problem which regulation can be made to help solve. For example, a rule saying that any sold or licensed LLM to businesses needs to be run against a set of cleaning / filtering models (like the recently-released Purple Llama) before being packed up and sold / hosted. Maybe there can be an exception for individuals and exempt orgs (charities and religions may get an exemption, I could imagine).
- telmo 3y ago> These were not AIs but rule-based systems with if elses. What is fashionable to call AI these days are ultimately rule-based systems with if elses. It just so happens that it's a bazillion of those, and they are created by gradient descent.
- mort96 3y agoAnd that they're not if-elses but nonlinear functions.
- telmo 3y agoYou mean functions such as: if x > 0: return x else: return 0 ?
- Matumio 3y agoThat's RELU, which clearly belongs to the realm of AI. Dangerous stuff.
- telmo 3y agoIt's almost like a chose the example on purpose ;)
- mort96 3y agoThat's one example of a nonlinear function, yes. You also have (eˣ)/(1+eˣ), or (e²ˣ-1)/(e²ˣ+1), or a host of others which don't contain anything if-like at all.
- telmo 3y agoMy somewhat snarky point was that there is no magic distinction such as: > These were not AIs but rule-based systems with if elses. I believe I already made my point with the ReLU example, if you don't want to concede it that is also ok.
- lnxg33k1 3y agoThe Alabama of Europe