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Comment by thu2111 | Hacker News Reader

EU regulation 2257/94 covers the abnormal curvature of bananas. There is no myth here, the EU does indeed regulate the straightness of bananas and has done for a long time.

As for this law, it is going to be heavily criticised and this rather polite post from Gellman is just the beginning. Even the quoted part in the top voted comment is absurd. What exactly are these "subliminal techniques" that need regulating? How do they work? There are no AI papers I recall that discuss how to build a mind controlling AI, let alone one that's designed to cause people psychological harm. Does the EU really believe in this stuff? I thought government belief in subliminal messaging and mind control disappeared with the CIA's LSD experiments decades ago.

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It does not regulate any shape of banana though. It standardises what was being used as a classification system. A banana that is S shaped is not banned, but you can't call it Extra.

Regulation does not mean the same thing as banning.

Wikipedia has a pretty good article on the banana issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_Regulation_(EC)_No....

> There are no AI papers I recall that discuss how to build a mind controlling AI, let alone one that's designed to cause people psychological harm.

https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full

"Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks"

"Core Data Science Team, Facebook, Inc., Menlo Park, CA 94025; and Departments of Communication and Information Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853"

That's probably the closest but it's not AI related. They just tweaked how often certain posts appeared based on the smileys attached to it, which doesn't involve AI or even statistics really.

Also, even if you consider the experiment unethical, it boosted as many people's exposure to positive emotions as to negative, so it's hard to claim that this is an attempt to create psychological harm. Any law that outlawed this would presumably outlaw all of psychology. And finally, it's a psych study. Is it right? Would it replicate? Who knows, by design it's not replicable. It would be bad policymaking to impose draconian laws on an entire continent based on a single questionable psych study that doesn't even have much to do with AI in the first place.

Under this proposed regulation, it doesn't have to be AI. "machine learning, logic/knowledge, statistics", as long as the goal is on the list of bad stuff in the regulation.

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