14 ms·

Artificial Intelligence Act: MEPs adopt law

62 points by ericb 3y ago

Argonaut998 3y ago
There’s zero reason to found a AI business in the EU when the same opportunity exists in the US. How long until the likes of Mistral escape?
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  Didn't the mistral founders work in the US and move back precisely to found a company in france?
- malermeister 3y ago
  Yes there is. I've lived in both the EU and the US for decades. The American lifestyle sucks. Don't underestimate that.
- Jensson 3y ago
  EU is much cheaper, that is a good reason, you can still sell in USA even if you develop the AI in Europe. Deepmind still operators from Europe.
- andersa 3y ago
  People are currently lobbying in the US to set up much worse legislation.
dr_dshiv 3y ago
Proposed: The laws were drafted in the age of narrow AI and have little relevance in the age of general AI (LLMs, etc).
- Jensson 3y ago
  I think these parts are relevant, it will be very nice to get this for LLM and image generators: > Generative AI, like ChatGPT, will not be classified as high-risk, but will have to comply with transparency requirements and EU copyright law: > Disclosing that the content was generated by AI > Designing the model to prevent it from generating illegal content > Publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training This means that now if an article was generated by LLM they are legally required to disclose that.
  - TunaTuna 3y ago
    Those last two are just going to make llms harder to use and act dumber. Annoying but not the end of the world. I have no idea how disclosure can possibly be enforced though. There's just no realistic way to distinguish a reasonably good image generation and a photoshop job.
  - Bjorkbat 3y ago
    > Disclosing that the content was generated by AI Hmm, hadn't thought of that angle before. So, like, if one uses a copilot to generate code, does it now have to be watermarked somehow?
  - dr_dshiv 3y ago
    Critiques: 1. "AI generated content": Is it generated by LLMs if LLMs were used in any way? e.g., getting ideas? If you use a single word? Sentence? Paragraph? If a person has edited things down? 2. "Prevent it from generating illegal content": It is illegal to libel. An autocorrect can generate libel. 3. "summaries of copyrighted data": and if it used GPT4 as the evaluator?
zoobab 3y ago
Censorship.
- pelorat 3y ago
  What. AI systems and LLM's do not have the same rights as humans do. In Europe corporations are thankfully not considered people like in the USA.
ecmascript 3y ago
I don't know what I think about this, probably it's not great. I'm afraid this will hinder smaller developers and enable larger corporations to get ahead just because extra legalize. Also, why is some stuff unacceptable but acceptable for the government? That seems a bit like censorship to me. The EU is really becoming a large organization that just does random shit that people don't really ask for. My government still publishes my personal data online for anyone to see, no one seems to care about that. Rules for thee but not for me.
NotGMan 3y ago
>> Designing the model to prevent it from generating illegal content Impossible. >> That is why it requires that national authorities provide companies with a testing environment that simulates conditions close to the real world. Who defines "close to real world"?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- taway_6PplYu5 3y ago
  according to your quote, national authorities.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
malermeister 3y ago
> Unacceptable risk AI systems are systems considered a threat to people and will be banned. They include: * Cognitive behavioural manipulation of people or specific vulnerable groups: for example voice-activated toys that encourage dangerous behaviour in children * Social scoring: classifying people based on behaviour, socio-economic status or personal characteristics * Biometric identification and categorisation of people * Real-time and remote biometric identification systems, such as facial recognition That seems... reasonable? I know regulation is a trigger word for some folks around here, but I think preventing a Chinese-style social credit system seems like a positive thing?
- _3u10 3y ago
  Yeah it will be an EU style credit score.
- tensor 3y ago
  Social scoring is an interesting topic. E.g. why is it not banned if you don't use AI? I'd guess that most social scoring systems today are not actually AI based. Perhaps they have some components that come from AI, but it's easy enough to make one with simpler mechanisms. Also, I assume insurance risk scoring is not banned, even though that is already almost a social scoring system. E.g. you live in a dangerous poor neighbourhood, higher insurance! You are a given age, higher insurance!
  - xpe 3y ago
    How do you find a meaningful definition of “simpler” mechanisms? / How do you differentiate ML from AI? (Many view ML as a subtype of AI.)
    - tensor 3y ago
      These are excellent questions. I was using AI in the seemingly typical way people use to today, to refer to large neural network systems. But yes, part of the issue around these laws and indeed the whole discussion is a lack of nuance about what exactly people even mean when they say AI. If I were to switch to my computer science context, then yes, I view ML as a subset of AI, an even view logic systems and rules systems as a subset of AI too. I doubt that the average person is thinking of PCA or even word embeddings when they say "AI" today, and that's a huge problem. Many of the risks these AI regulation laws are worried about apply equally well to both simpler than LLM systems, and even apply to basic statistics and data aggregating. In my opinion risk mitigation laws should not be specific to AI, but be problem focused instead. Similarly, "AI training bans" for say web content would also be far improved with more nuance. Many laypeople argue that banning AI training doesn't ban web indexing. But based on my professional training I would not personally implement even a basic tf-idf system on any data that has "AI training banned" as tf-idf is a basic AI system according to the strict definition. We'd do far better being more explicit, and banning perhaps "generative AI systems" or "AI systems that are capable of generating substantial subsets of the content." It wouldn't be perfect but it would be a hell of a lot better than the trajectory we're on today.
kylecazar 3y ago
How do we prevent humans from wholly relying on/trusting AI in systems that the world's stability relies on. That to me is the biggest 'unacceptable risk'. A human putting a system we don't fully understand in charge of a critical process. Article says all high risk systems will be 'assessed' before being put to market. There's a limit to how well you can understand the side effects before deployment.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  What critical processes are you thinking about here?
- Jensson 3y ago
  > How do we prevent humans from wholly relying on/trusting AI in systems that the world's stability relies on. By being transparent and disclosing how the AI was trained and what content was generated by AI. That removes the magic, once people understand how simple these things are and how easy it is to tune the results to make the AI say whatever you want people will stop trusting them quickly. And that is part of what these regulations are about. Transparency instead of marketing buzzwords.
  - nathanaldensr 3y ago
    I like to be very blunt with people who don't know anything about this stuff by just saying "AI doesn't exist." There is nothing intelligent about "AI," and people need to know that.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      Ever since ChatGPT has become mainstream, I've talked about it to my non-tech friends as “simulated intelligence” instead of “artificial ingelligence” to emphasize that it is not intelligence, it is just simulating intelligence, and sometimes the simulation is realistic and sometimes it's far off.
      - 3y ago
TkTech 3y ago
The linked article is old and out of date, nor has the act gone into effect yet (it has legality checks and other processes to go through first). The actual adoption notice is https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240308IPR19015/artificial-intelligence-act-meps-adopt-landmark-law https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240308IP... Edit: The link has since been updated :)
djyaz1200 3y ago
Interested to see what comes of this... "Publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training"
- Vuizur 3y ago
  Everybody who has released a decent model has used a shadow library dump for training. Are they going to admit that they illegally downloaded more than 20 million books?
  - belter 3y ago
    That is what half of the 7 trillion dollars are for...
    - __loam 3y ago
      I heard a really interesting take somewhere recently (I believe it was on the verge's decoder podcast which is excellent), that a lot of the people in these organizations think this issue is a money problem and not a "fuck you fuck off forever keep your fucking hands off my data" problem, which could actually derail the entire genai industry as they run into more legal hurdles.
seydor 3y ago
Premature legislation misses the target. Gdpr targeted personal data collection, a relatively anodyne adverse effect of social media, but missed addiction which is the real damaging externality. I wonder what they miss this time
lawlessone 3y ago
This really seems to just be an extension of GDPR. Mostly just don't use AI to discriminate or manipulate people. quite light touch and Not at all as bad as I was expecting.
estebarb 3y ago
I get the good intentions, but I don't like that the restrictions may be too broad and may hinder useful innovation. For example: I once got trapped against the door in a building with a fire alert. The door was badge controlled and a several panicked people were pressing me against the door. I would loved a surveillance system to detect scared people and decide to unlock the doors automatically in an emergency. We should punish bad usages, not ban broad categories just because politicians lack creativity.
- Bjorkbat 3y ago
  You don't necessarily need AI to create a door that opens during a fire alert. You could simply make it so that the door is no longer badge controlled if a fire alert goes off. Sure, it's possible someone might exploit this by creating a fake fire alert to open the door, but they could also trick the AI you suggested by using a fake panicked expression, maybe get some friends in on the prank. Kind of a segue into why I think AI hype and crypto hype are uncannily similar. You could argue that blockchains have a lot of potential uses, it's just that we already have some kind of legacy technology that works fine and is usually much cheaper. In much the same way, I'd say 90% of people are using LLMs as search engines, albeit search engines that are more expensive and return strange results. Anyway, point being, 99% of the applications one could imagine getting sniped by this law probably can probably be implemented using alternative, non-AI technologies.
kabigon 3y ago
We need to act on AI now. We need to limit it's ubiquity, we cannot allow it to take ANYONE's job. We are heading towards absolute doom if we allow this. Humanity will be doomed.
- free_bip 3y ago
  I hate to break it to you but AI has been ubiquitous and taking people's jobs for decades now. [0] is an interesting article on the subject. The cat's out of the bag, and humanity isn't doomed yet (at least not due to AI). I'm not convinced. [0]: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/history-artificial-intelligence/ https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/history-artificial-i...
- ben_w 3y ago
  Technophobia is a constant surprise to me, especially here. But then, I'm weirdly far in the direction of embracing change — it took me until my 30s to learn about the Chesterton's Fence version of conservatism, and through that example that there was any form of conservatism which had merit. Looking it up, I'm surprised how common technophobia is, 85-90%[0]; I should be more mindful of this. I was going to say something about Marx welcoming this, but this time I found the issues of industrialisation and who benefits from the investments went further back than I previously thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Stocking_Frames,_etc._Act_1788 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Stocking_Frames,... [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20080511165100/http://www.learningcircuits.org/2000/mar2000/mar2000_elearn.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080511165100/http://www.learni...

62 points by ericb 3y ago

There’s zero reason to found a AI business in the EU when the same opportunity exists in the US. How long until the likes of Mistral escape?

amadeuspagel 3y ago
Didn't the mistral founders work in the US and move back precisely to found a company in france?
malermeister 3y ago
Yes there is. I've lived in both the EU and the US for decades. The American lifestyle sucks. Don't underestimate that.
Jensson 3y ago
EU is much cheaper, that is a good reason, you can still sell in USA even if you develop the AI in Europe. Deepmind still operators from Europe.
andersa 3y ago
People are currently lobbying in the US to set up much worse legislation.

dr_dshiv 3y ago

Proposed: The laws were drafted in the age of narrow AI and have little relevance in the age of general AI (LLMs, etc).

Jensson 3y ago
I think these parts are relevant, it will be very nice to get this for LLM and image generators: > Generative AI, like ChatGPT, will not be classified as high-risk, but will have to comply with transparency requirements and EU copyright law: > Disclosing that the content was generated by AI > Designing the model to prevent it from generating illegal content > Publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training This means that now if an article was generated by LLM they are legally required to disclose that.
- TunaTuna 3y ago
  Those last two are just going to make llms harder to use and act dumber. Annoying but not the end of the world. I have no idea how disclosure can possibly be enforced though. There's just no realistic way to distinguish a reasonably good image generation and a photoshop job.
- Bjorkbat 3y ago
  > Disclosing that the content was generated by AI Hmm, hadn't thought of that angle before. So, like, if one uses a copilot to generate code, does it now have to be watermarked somehow?
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  Critiques: 1. "AI generated content": Is it generated by LLMs if LLMs were used in any way? e.g., getting ideas? If you use a single word? Sentence? Paragraph? If a person has edited things down? 2. "Prevent it from generating illegal content": It is illegal to libel. An autocorrect can generate libel. 3. "summaries of copyrighted data": and if it used GPT4 as the evaluator?

zoobab 3y ago

Censorship.

pelorat 3y ago
What. AI systems and LLM's do not have the same rights as humans do. In Europe corporations are thankfully not considered people like in the USA.

ecmascript 3y ago

I don't know what I think about this, probably it's not great. I'm afraid this will hinder smaller developers and enable larger corporations to get ahead just because extra legalize. Also, why is some stuff unacceptable but acceptable for the government? That seems a bit like censorship to me. The EU is really becoming a large organization that just does random shit that people don't really ask for. My government still publishes my personal data online for anyone to see, no one seems to care about that. Rules for thee but not for me.

NotGMan 3y ago

>> Designing the model to prevent it from generating illegal content Impossible. >> That is why it requires that national authorities provide companies with a testing environment that simulates conditions close to the real world. Who defines "close to real world"?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
taway_6PplYu5 3y ago
according to your quote, national authorities.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

malermeister 3y ago

> Unacceptable risk AI systems are systems considered a threat to people and will be banned. They include: * Cognitive behavioural manipulation of people or specific vulnerable groups: for example voice-activated toys that encourage dangerous behaviour in children * Social scoring: classifying people based on behaviour, socio-economic status or personal characteristics * Biometric identification and categorisation of people * Real-time and remote biometric identification systems, such as facial recognition That seems... reasonable? I know regulation is a trigger word for some folks around here, but I think preventing a Chinese-style social credit system seems like a positive thing?

_3u10 3y ago
Yeah it will be an EU style credit score.
tensor 3y ago
Social scoring is an interesting topic. E.g. why is it not banned if you don't use AI? I'd guess that most social scoring systems today are not actually AI based. Perhaps they have some components that come from AI, but it's easy enough to make one with simpler mechanisms. Also, I assume insurance risk scoring is not banned, even though that is already almost a social scoring system. E.g. you live in a dangerous poor neighbourhood, higher insurance! You are a given age, higher insurance!
- xpe 3y ago
  How do you find a meaningful definition of “simpler” mechanisms? / How do you differentiate ML from AI? (Many view ML as a subtype of AI.)
  - tensor 3y ago
    These are excellent questions. I was using AI in the seemingly typical way people use to today, to refer to large neural network systems. But yes, part of the issue around these laws and indeed the whole discussion is a lack of nuance about what exactly people even mean when they say AI. If I were to switch to my computer science context, then yes, I view ML as a subset of AI, an even view logic systems and rules systems as a subset of AI too. I doubt that the average person is thinking of PCA or even word embeddings when they say "AI" today, and that's a huge problem. Many of the risks these AI regulation laws are worried about apply equally well to both simpler than LLM systems, and even apply to basic statistics and data aggregating. In my opinion risk mitigation laws should not be specific to AI, but be problem focused instead. Similarly, "AI training bans" for say web content would also be far improved with more nuance. Many laypeople argue that banning AI training doesn't ban web indexing. But based on my professional training I would not personally implement even a basic tf-idf system on any data that has "AI training banned" as tf-idf is a basic AI system according to the strict definition. We'd do far better being more explicit, and banning perhaps "generative AI systems" or "AI systems that are capable of generating substantial subsets of the content." It wouldn't be perfect but it would be a hell of a lot better than the trajectory we're on today.

kylecazar 3y ago

How do we prevent humans from wholly relying on/trusting AI in systems that the world's stability relies on. That to me is the biggest 'unacceptable risk'. A human putting a system we don't fully understand in charge of a critical process. Article says all high risk systems will be 'assessed' before being put to market. There's a limit to how well you can understand the side effects before deployment.

RandomLensman 3y ago
What critical processes are you thinking about here?
Jensson 3y ago
> How do we prevent humans from wholly relying on/trusting AI in systems that the world's stability relies on. By being transparent and disclosing how the AI was trained and what content was generated by AI. That removes the magic, once people understand how simple these things are and how easy it is to tune the results to make the AI say whatever you want people will stop trusting them quickly. And that is part of what these regulations are about. Transparency instead of marketing buzzwords.
- nathanaldensr 3y ago
  I like to be very blunt with people who don't know anything about this stuff by just saying "AI doesn't exist." There is nothing intelligent about "AI," and people need to know that.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    Ever since ChatGPT has become mainstream, I've talked about it to my non-tech friends as “simulated intelligence” instead of “artificial ingelligence” to emphasize that it is not intelligence, it is just simulating intelligence, and sometimes the simulation is realistic and sometimes it's far off.
    - 3y ago

TkTech 3y ago

The linked article is old and out of date, nor has the act gone into effect yet (it has legality checks and other processes to go through first). The actual adoption notice is https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240308IPR19015/artificial-intelligence-act-meps-adopt-landmark-law https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240308IP... Edit: The link has since been updated :)

djyaz1200 3y ago

Interested to see what comes of this... "Publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training"

Vuizur 3y ago
Everybody who has released a decent model has used a shadow library dump for training. Are they going to admit that they illegally downloaded more than 20 million books?
- belter 3y ago
  That is what half of the 7 trillion dollars are for...
  - __loam 3y ago
    I heard a really interesting take somewhere recently (I believe it was on the verge's decoder podcast which is excellent), that a lot of the people in these organizations think this issue is a money problem and not a "fuck you fuck off forever keep your fucking hands off my data" problem, which could actually derail the entire genai industry as they run into more legal hurdles.

seydor 3y ago

Premature legislation misses the target. Gdpr targeted personal data collection, a relatively anodyne adverse effect of social media, but missed addiction which is the real damaging externality. I wonder what they miss this time

lawlessone 3y ago

This really seems to just be an extension of GDPR. Mostly just don't use AI to discriminate or manipulate people. quite light touch and Not at all as bad as I was expecting.

estebarb 3y ago

I get the good intentions, but I don't like that the restrictions may be too broad and may hinder useful innovation. For example: I once got trapped against the door in a building with a fire alert. The door was badge controlled and a several panicked people were pressing me against the door. I would loved a surveillance system to detect scared people and decide to unlock the doors automatically in an emergency. We should punish bad usages, not ban broad categories just because politicians lack creativity.

Bjorkbat 3y ago
You don't necessarily need AI to create a door that opens during a fire alert. You could simply make it so that the door is no longer badge controlled if a fire alert goes off. Sure, it's possible someone might exploit this by creating a fake fire alert to open the door, but they could also trick the AI you suggested by using a fake panicked expression, maybe get some friends in on the prank. Kind of a segue into why I think AI hype and crypto hype are uncannily similar. You could argue that blockchains have a lot of potential uses, it's just that we already have some kind of legacy technology that works fine and is usually much cheaper. In much the same way, I'd say 90% of people are using LLMs as search engines, albeit search engines that are more expensive and return strange results. Anyway, point being, 99% of the applications one could imagine getting sniped by this law probably can probably be implemented using alternative, non-AI technologies.

kabigon 3y ago

We need to act on AI now. We need to limit it's ubiquity, we cannot allow it to take ANYONE's job. We are heading towards absolute doom if we allow this. Humanity will be doomed.

free_bip 3y ago
I hate to break it to you but AI has been ubiquitous and taking people's jobs for decades now. [0] is an interesting article on the subject. The cat's out of the bag, and humanity isn't doomed yet (at least not due to AI). I'm not convinced. [0]: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/history-artificial-intelligence/ https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/history-artificial-i...
ben_w 3y ago
Technophobia is a constant surprise to me, especially here. But then, I'm weirdly far in the direction of embracing change — it took me until my 30s to learn about the Chesterton's Fence version of conservatism, and through that example that there was any form of conservatism which had merit. Looking it up, I'm surprised how common technophobia is, 85-90%[0]; I should be more mindful of this. I was going to say something about Marx welcoming this, but this time I found the issues of industrialisation and who benefits from the investments went further back than I previously thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Stocking_Frames,_etc._Act_1788 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Stocking_Frames,... [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20080511165100/http://www.learningcircuits.org/2000/mar2000/mar2000_elearn.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080511165100/http://www.learni...