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The stupidest of the new rules: 1) AI Act includes bans on biometric systems that identify people based on "sensitive characteristics", such as sexual orientat

• ginko 3y ago
  >LOL, so an AI isn't "allowed" to tell if a person is black, white or Asian? Yes. I don't see what you find so funny about this.
  • bequanna 3y ago
    Race is one of the most important attributes used to describe a person of interest. Sex, race, height, build, hair, last known clothing
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • simion314 3y ago
      And do you need an AI to guess your customer race or sexual preferences ? If is needed for the service (maybe you are a doctor)you just ask. If is illegal for you to ask and use someones race then it should not be legal for you to guess it and then use that guess in your algorithms.
      • mytailorisrich 3y ago
        If it is illegal to collect and use that information then you don't need to additionally regulate algorithms specifically... And if it is legal to collect and use that information then it seems nonsensical to ban the use of algorithms specifically...
        • troupo 3y ago
          Nope. That's not how it works. Even if it is legal to collect that information, it does not imply that it's legal (or desirable to begin with) to feed that information to a blackbox algorithm.
          • mytailorisrich 3y ago
            Hence I specifically wrote "use it"... The GDPR use "process it", which is generic enough to cover AI.
            • troupo 3y ago
              > The GDPR use "process it", which is generic enough to cover AI. Nope, it's not. Because, again, sending user data to a magic black box may be illegal. While processing it in other ways could be legal.
              • mytailorisrich 3y ago
                You are not replying to my comments. You are adding an additional constraint that wasn't in my initial comment. My point is that if collection and processing is regulated then that covers AI. And thus there is no "sending user data to a magic black box may be illegal" but my whole comment was that this wasn't needed. AI is just a tool, it's just automated processing. Btw, 'nope' passes off as rather dismissive and rude.
                • troupo 3y ago
                  > You are adding an additional constraint that wasn't in my initial comment. No. I'm showing that your conclusions don't logically follow from the premise. > My point is that if collection and processing is regulated then that covers AI. No. No it doesn't. > but my whole comment was that this wasn't needed. AI is just a tool, it's just automated processing. And that, too, isn't entirely true, precisely because AI is a tool, and a different one. We always adapt or pass new laws and regulations for new, significantly different, tools. For example, just because you can process data doesn't necessarily mean that you can process it in any way by any tools available to you. "GDPR allows you process data" does not immediately imply "this data can be processed by AIs". There is a reason why I was "adding additional constraints". Because these constraints are why additional laws and/or regulations around AI are needed. For example, one of the stipulations of the AI Act is [1]: "AI systems shall be developed and used in a way that allows appropriate traceability and explainability, while making humans aware that they communicate or interact with an AI system as well as duly informing users of the capabilities and limitations of that AI system and affected persons about their rights". The reason being stories like this: https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-warning-for-europe-over-risks-of-using-algorithms/ https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-wa... That stipulation alone isn't covered by any existing laws. There are bits and pieces here and there about various processes in various contexts, but this act brings them all together in one coherent form applicable to AI systems (which are appropriately broadly defined in the act [2]). Or, there's an entire Article 5 explicitly prohibiting the use of AI in sensitive and outright harmful areas. Including things like banning them for large-scale suveillance except in very narrow scopes. Note that, again, there's undoubtedly pieces of this scattered around various regulations, but this one makes them clear and make them specifically applicable to AIs. That's why I keep repeating: no, the fact that someone allows to collect and process data does not immediately imply that this collection and processing can be done with AIs. Where applicable, this law references existing ones. [1] Quoting from this excellent article https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/the-truth-about-the-eu-act/ https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/the-truth-about-the-eu-ac... [2] Annex I: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52021PC0206 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52...
    • tpm 3y ago
      Race is a social construct. It's used the way you describe in some societies, but not in others, and even if it is, the races have different definitions.
      • malux85 3y ago
        It’s not entirely a social construct, for example there are very clear genetic factors - you could use a clustering algorithm on genetic data to reveal there are very clear groups, regardless of which social culture is doing this clustering, the clusters would still emerge, because math. You’re right that the borders are not well defined though - it is a probably distribution - just like the weights in a neural network are also a probability distribution
        • tpm 3y ago
          There are no clear genetic factors at all. They don't exist, because there are no clear biological delineations between 'races'. It's a purely social construct. You maybe could sort of define a group of people coming from the same locality and having the same history , and they would have maybe some degree of biological similarity as well, but there would be a high number of those groups and even then it would be quite useless and with number of exceptions.
          • junofan 3y ago
            Come on, that’s just today’s Lysenkoism. We can talk like adults here.
            • tpm 3y ago
              Prove me wrong. Give me a way to detect race from DNA sample with 100% accuracy.
              • malux85 3y ago
                Set the bar at impossible so you cant be proved wrong. No system anywhere is 100% accurate, and to demand that as a standard only shows your numerical illiteracy.
  • avalys 3y ago
    You don't see anything funny about a biometric identification system that is not allowed to consider factors that would be considered indicative of "race"?
    • ginko 3y ago
      Not really. It's reasonable to ban the automatic detection of stuff like this.
      • Levitz 3y ago
        I honestly think it's stupid. Person A won't be identified because of being Chinese, he will be identified because of being a second generation immigrant that has a Chinese diet, interest in STEM and has a Chinese name. The reason there are racial stereotypes is because there are trends among different races and skin color is a very evident trait for humans to identify. AI will draw the trends from everything else instead, which will draw the same picture, but skipping one specific parameter because it feels icky for humans. Assume an increased chance of someone being interested into the arts and liberal because of dyed hair? Sure! Assume an increased chance of knowing Spanish because of being Hispanic? Ew no that's prejudiced. It's so very stupid.
    • simbolit 3y ago
      A biometric id system which can only distinguish "clowns" from "non-clowns" and makes a lot of errors with regard to the images of famous billionaires. That is funny. Your example? Not funny at all.
  • malux85 3y ago
    As with anything the devil is in the details - The word “tell” there is doing a lot of work. Does it mean “The AI should not have any bias towards any race” Or does it mean “The AI should not be able to distinguish whatsoever between two races” To me, the phrasing above “AI should not be able to tell” sounds like the latter, which is drastically wrong and I suspect difficult to prove. I think most people would agree it should not have bias, but it’s important that in the wording of the law we don’t eliminate functional stuff that’s important - ie being able to determine race - for example there are certain medical conditions that affect different races at different rates, so the ability to distinguish is an important factor in analysis.
    • simbolit 3y ago
      As user siminion314 wrote: "If [it] is needed for the service (...) you just ask"
    • developer93 3y ago
      I guess it's easier to require it not be able to distinguish at all than define what bias actually is and what the errors on that are.
  • stale2002 3y ago
    The reason why it is funny is that almost by definition, anything that a biometric data detectors could detect would fall under the banned category. A bio-metrics detector, detects biometrics! And the law basically bans bio metrics detectors from detecting biometrics. It would be like if there was a law that said that restaurants can't sell food. Or if hammer regulations prevented hammers from being used on nails. Or that water could be used for anything but making things wet or drinking. It is almost definitionally contradictory. That is indeed funny.
  • phyrex 3y ago
    It’s funny because 1) any person you interact with face to face can tell your race and 2) what is the AI supposed to do if you tell it your race?
    • huimang 3y ago
      I still don't see the humor here. 1) The overall point is to not let AI use racial bias as a factor in its decision-making. 2) Actually, there are a lot of people whose "race" is vague. My buddy has been asked if he's <random, different ethnicity/nationality> at least 5 times that I've noticed. 3) "Race" is a social construct anyways. In the US, in modern times, we delineate "races" in a specific manner, but these delineations have varied across history and cultures. See the one-drop rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule).
• simbolit 3y ago
  You do not explain why these rules are stupid, much less "the stupidest". Both rules, on first sight, make __a lot__ of sense.
  • scrollaway 3y ago
    “Transparency” is stupid for some people here because they cannot fathom that a technology significantly impacting people’s lives should be auditable.
    • RandomLensman 3y ago
      Transparency of the inner workings isn't really relevant - getting the right results is (whatever that means in any particular situation). It diverts a lot of effort from solving the actual issues. A transparent but poor decision is not really much better than an opaque poor decision.
      • jddj 3y ago
        I think that a world where that comment holds up to scrutiny would be very different to the one we've got. There's no magic objective moralism box that you can put a decision into and have it weigh its consequences and a little green or red light turns on. Good for whom? Under what assumptions was it made? In what context does it hold? All of that is transparency.
        • RandomLensman 3y ago
          That would be what regulation should address and not sidestep. Politics are there to make exactly those types of moral decisions. If you want certain behaviour from corporations using AI for something, it might be better to directly police the behaviour and not indirectly via peering inside tools. Creating mountains of documentations on the model for a regulator will not do that. Similarly, using the input/training data quality as vehicle to avoid, e.g., discrimination is weaker than directly targeting an outcome.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• pelorat 3y ago
  It's illegal in most of the EU, maybe all of the EU, to register ones "race", even for the police.
  • personomas 3y ago
    What do you mean? I don't understand.