The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably
wolfhf.medium.com
wolfhf.medium.com
And Europeans will only get to benefit as consumers, not as makers of AI.
And the EU will take that as a reason to regulate even harder and then also somehow end up giving a bunch of money to its telcos.
EDIT:
My point is that regulation doesn’t just prevent “bad products”. The compliance overhead also prevents good products.
That being said, I agree that there are certain decisions and actions that always should require a human appeals process
So in effect the eu is protecting it’s citizens work from theft and companies from unethical competition.
But Small companies can’t afford the compliance overhead.
And big companies can only develop out of small companies.
So they will develop elsewhere
They really are "let's annoy people people so they hate GDPR popups", not so much "GDPR popups".
You would not ask "can I track you?" to random people physically entering your store as a storekeeper.
A funny but probably true prediction. Brussels loves handing money to PTTs the way the US Congress loves handing it out to Raytheon.
Why though?
Like, most of the requirements listed in the AI act seem extremely reasonable and low-overhead, if not seriously meek. Given the immense budgets AI labs can call upon, why would "having to fill a form that says you made sure the AI wasn't racist" be a disqualifying factor?
Safety regulations exist in every major industry, and sometimes it slows some progress for the sake of individuals. This isn't a bad thing.
Software development as a discipline certainly needs more rigor like the other engineering disciplines. However the AI act is premature since AI ultimately is an implementation detail for a variety of use-cases, that should be regulated independently, not AI. Regulating AI in general is like regulating electrons.
If the EU has an issue with AI potentially resulting in more misinformation, then regulate the types of sites, that is social media, that would be the vector for such spread.
I'm open to counterexamples outside those class of examples.
At the end of the day guns do not shoot people on their own, though.
Pretending that any of the regulation of guns or AI is done with the understanding that they are anything other than powerful tools that can be used by humans to do profound damage is a strawman argument. We all understand that guns don't shoot people on their own. Don't oppose regulation by characterizing the opposing viewpoint as something it isn't.
At the end of the day you either democratize the access, or you don't. Those who want to break the law will break it either way. All you are going to do is punish those who follow the law by not giving them access.
For what it's worth - I couldn't care less about guns and wouldn't mind their banning. However I trust my government. If you do not, I would not want guns to be banned. But that's the thing - a government I don't trust would not want citizens to have guns to begin with, and thus the dilemma.
People driving drunk do profound damage as well. Cars don't kill people on their own. Would you agree with making drunk driving legal again?
When a tool allows a person to do a lot of damage, it should be regulated to prevent bystanders from taking the brunt of other peoples' bad decisions. A race to the bottom doesn't really help anybody.
If you're going to argue that every tool that allows people to do harm should be not regulated at all because the tool isn't anthropomorphized, I'm not sure how we can have a discussion at all about it.
No, because drunk driving inhibits your ability to operate a vehicle lawfully.
a better example would be using your phone while driving. should this be illegal? it's well documented that using your phone, even if hands-free increases car accidents. should phones be designed to automatically shut off while in a vehicle?
your ak47 example is also just silly. please use better examples to make your point.
There are already laws governing phone use while driving in many places. In my experience, people using phones while driving can be extremely dangerous, and I've often wished that people couldn't do so.
My AK-47 example was intentionally silly, and was framed as something silly and extreme, as a direct comparison to you accusing me of believing that government was infallible. I'm not sure why you're pointing out that something I explicitly pointed out as extreme and unreasonable is extreme and unreasonable. That was the entire point: that we will get nowhere by attacking straw men.
The solution is to educate people to do less self or other's harm. To understand how to operate with these things.
But educating people is expensive and difficult. It also sometimes backfire in creating a population that's much harder to persuade. So yeah let's regulate these idiots to death...
I'd much rather have a good culture than good regulations, if I had the choice. I think most people would, but there's no sure path to get there. Switzerland has some magic sauce that other countries would be hard pressed to replicate at scale.
Elsewhere in the thread you have touched on firearm regulation; it's worth noting that amongst states with the capacity to do so, it is really only the US that abdicates its responsibility to regulate firearms, with predictably tragic consequences (though, as with everything in the US, that varies state to state etc.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959903/
Food should be regulated because as you mentioned it is consumed and is a vector for obvious harm. In addition to that due to the fact that food is comprised of chemicals, it is difficult to ascertain the quality of food once prepared without consumption.
Banning AI is like banning books. Useless. Information will spread either way. It'll just do so elsewhere.
Given that reasonable people disagree, it's not even close to comparable.
The trends of polarization and politically extreme positions in America in particular over the past 30 years are profound and striking.
Many capital intensive internationally traded industries are different. Once overseas competitors have been through a few innovation cycles and sunk tens of billions of dollars into product development it's basically impossible to catch up. Even with government support.
TSMC is the canonical example, but similar principals apply with Amazon and other big tech companies with high infra spending. More subtly, industries with high marketing costs are very hard to penetrate at scale when an incumbent has reached a certain depth. See enterprise software with MSFT or high fashion with LVMH.
As well as losing the opportunity for economical development in a new industry, dependence on overseas imports for critical industries creates geopolitical headaches.
European governments recognised this risk in aerospace a few decades ago, and the Airbus project saved Europe and the world from a Boeing dominated international passenger jet market.
I've lived in both the USA and The Netherlands and I now live in The Netherlands. I recently had to renew my Dutch driver's license and the entire process so painless and quick. Compared to my experiences doing the same thing in both Virginia and California it was a lovely breeze. That's progress. That's innovation.
Don't even get me started on the byzantine nonsense that is the IRS versus the Belastingdienst. I'll take the Belastingdienst any day.
Americans wouldn't know real innovation if a walkable neighborhood arrived on a highspeed train and began eliminating healthcare bureaucracy.
Thanks for the laugh, beautifully put.
In general I agree with your point, Americans hyperfocus on certain types of innovation (reinventing this or that wheel, "revolutionising X", like every single bullshit "reinventing transportation" "like a train, but much worse" proposal out there), mistake everything else for lack of innovation, and totally miss the forrest for the trees. New and different stuff is celebrated, even if it's an obvious disaster in the making for most involved (e.g. Uber destroying labour protections, Airbnb putting immense pressure on already stressed housing markets, idiots reinventing trains but worse with "pods").
Meanwhile American companies are drastically behind in many niches (airplanes, cars, trains, railroad companies, cosmetics, etc.), but you don't hear Americans complain for their lack of innovation. But when anything EU is mentioned "innovation is dead, Deutsche Telekom is so old and just sucking Brussels money". When Intel gets subsidies to manage to catch up to the competition because they stagnated it's strategic, but when EU funds go for anything it's handouts propping up failing industries.
To be stereotypical: in the US organisations exist to provide value people choose to pay for (e.g. electric cars; cheap rocketry; cheaper accommodation for travel; cheaper and much more convenient taxis); in the EU they exist to employ people, and hopefully they provide value, but if they don't provide much it's fine because it's pretty difficult to start a competitor anyway.
I think this is simply untrue. US is profit focused above all, customer experience be damned. If you need examples, check Boeing killing people to get a plane out as soon as possible with ridiculously bad engineering choices; railroad companies skimping on decades old safety tech to keep profits as high as possible; healthcare being the quagmire that it is; massive companies posting record profits while laying off employees en masse; extremely customer hostile practices like like selling customer data everywhere; abusive pricing models on basic infrastructure like internet and mobile; etc. etc.
The only segment I can think about where you can legitimately say "customer-focused" is in hospitality, and that's only because employees have to, them getting any money depending directly on customers being very happy. For me it's to annoying extents though.
> in the EU they exist to employ people, and hopefully they provide value, but if they don't provide much it's fine because it's pretty difficult to start a competitor anyway.
Also disagree. That's not how things work, even in flag airlines, let alone private companies. And no, it's not difficult to start a competitor outside of capital-intensive market segments, which is the same everywhere.
Do you think there’s some kind of karmic point scoring system that you win by being the first one to build horrible unethical dystopian AI models?
Or are you just complaining you won’t be able to horrifically exploit people using them to make lots of money?
…because, sure, red tape is bad, but is it ultimately that terrible not being a allowed to be super villain?
“But America has super villains! …! We’re being left behind…”
Ok… um. Yeah… I’m ok with that. Please don’t try to be a super villain.
These laws don’t seem nearly as outrageous as you make them out to be.
So wealth is leaking(patent costs etc) out of Europe and the continent will have less wealth in total over time. Especially now that the cheap Russian energy they had access too is going to their manufacturing rival China and it will also boost Indian development manufacturing.
Brussels is doing everything in their power to deindustrialise and make Europe less competitive on the global market..
> Kind of like how EU car manufacturers have been sleeping on the EV movement. Now they have to source their parts from Chinese manufacturers.
Do we know that’s actually because they weren’t able to innovate on their own due to Brussels regulation, or some other factor?
That's a meme and not true at all. Well, of course a lot of European car makers source from China. As does everyone, everywhere, else.
The amount of AI startups that are being restricted by this are minimal. Hugging Face isn't going to have to shut down because of this. University research into the best ways to stabilize GAN training isn't going to grind to a standstill. Companies developing weeding robots aren't going to have to turn to symbolic AI for image recognition. Scientists are still going to be able to model landslide risk caused by receding glaciers.
Maybe only 1% of AI start ups will be negatively effected by this to the point they would be better off leaving Europe.
I am not in a EU country and I would never ever vote to join the EU, but this is one of the better EU legislations. Saying this would "kill all startups" is like saying GDPR will kill all internet business in Europe. Its both alarmist and false.
What if an AI research company doesn't want to be a supervillain or do bad things but they (or their investors) decide it's safer to just do the research in a jurisdiction where they face less risk of being subjected to regulatory burden especially during the early exploratory stage. Surely they'll care about abiding to the rules of one of the major world's markets, but they'll so it after they have a mature product.
At least that's how I interpreted GP's comment. EU will eventually get the product that confirms to the safety specifications that we all agree they should, but it will be a foreign product.
"What if an oil research company doesn't want to be a supervillain or do bad things but they (or their investors) decide it's safer to just do the research in a jurisdiction where they face less risk of being subjected to regulatory burden especially during the early exploratory stage."
Edit: In case anyone is confused, Post 1880, Land in modern day Oklahoma was considered "unassigned" according to the genocidal government and led to a "Land run" where vigilantes, crooks, scammers and generally unsavory people flooded the area - creating "Boomers" and "Sooners" that were given license to go and steal land from native people's where there were no govt regulations and they just started drilling for oil basically immediately
This kind of "externality washing" is talked about as though it were some kind of amoral or practical business matter separate from ethical decisions, rather than an explicit attempt to avoid responsibility for the community that you are moving into.
That is to say, organizations look for economic areas that do not have power structures that will scrutinize, push back or otherwise enforce community social standards on said organizations. Capital will always find a downtrodden population to exploit for it's own development BECAUSE they do not have other protections.
Having watched this new brand of "AI" capitalists behave, that's exactly what they want to do with it
I know plenty of people who avoid the healthcare sector because of HIPAA and avoid handling credit card data because of PCI. PCI and HIPAA are well-intentioned but can scare off innovators.
As a programmer who used to work on medical devices, these sound pretty similar like the FDA regulations we dealt with. The goal isn't to stifle innovation, it's to keep scammers and crooks out of the market and make things better for everyone. The EU doesn't want another Thalidomide, and the US shouldn't want another Theranos.
I am all in favor of reasonable, individual rights protecting regulation. The EU AI act might just be one, as is GDPR.
But please consider this:
How many people’s lives could have been saved if FDA regulations didn’t make medical approvals take 10 years? How many life-saving medications could have been invented if the cost of approval didn’t limit innovation to the biggest companies?
Medical regulations are written in literal blood and dead people. Really good example for Chesterton's fence.
You cannot see the damage done by regulation, but it exists.
Regulation is always a trade-off.
It’s not “us vs them”. It’s us vs us.
Unregulated medical research is bad, like in really, literall Nazi doctor bad. Shocking it still has to pointed out...
We don’t know! But to ask incredulously about only one side of these questions is disingenuous.
We can't really know whether it was a net good or a net bad because we can't take a look at the reality that didn't happen. What we do know is that there were deadly medications on the market before the FDA. There were medications available over the counter that were outright poisonous. Arsenic and mercury were in common medicines.
It is a balance. You can sacrifice lives through inaction, or sacrifice lives in the way of progress. Lack of regulation is bad, but so is overregulation.
The EU has rules for aircraft and automobile manufacturing and yet Airbus and Ferrari seem to be able to continue to be world leaders in their fields.
Moreover, there are very few restrictions on many industries in Somalia, yet for some reason it fails to be a hub of innovation.
Regulations don’t immediately mean a flight of intellectual capability to less restrictive places.
This. Most people forget that the US is still a highly regulated place. And the tech hub (California/Bay Area) is a highly-taxed and highly-bureaucratic area too...
It's not deregulation or investment. Innovative economies are like emergent behavior. They spring out of chaos and no one has no understanding so far how that happens.
I’m saying you have to consider the price of regulation.
Airbus is able to compete in the airliner market because it’s a huge incumbent.
Maybe this is the price we have to pay for safe planes. But there is almost zero competition in the airline manufacturing sector because the regulation is keeping out any potential competition.
Basically what they're trying to prevent, is that you can't deny someone welfare, or an insurance claim, or a close their bank account with the justification that "computer says NO"[1]. For every such decision, a human should be at the wheel who can bring a legal fitting justification and be responsible for it.
Anyone following the space would be aware that there's currently a huge Cambrian explosion of innovation in foundation models going on. Something like this, requiring you to go through a bunch of potentially expensive bureaucracy would completely kill this growth in the EU, to the benefit of the larger players.
The EU is trying to get around this by acting quickly before constituencies can develop. This will make no one happy - it's like my wife telling me that a car's going to hit me if I walk out the front door so she's locking me inside. All I'll know about is that I can't go for a walk. I might hear that the neighbor got hit by a car but I'll also hear that they get to go for walks so to the degree the strategy is successful it's also to the degree that it fails.
As well as giving the power to a judge to punish companies if the public sentiment goes negative.
For Americans, this concept seems to be almost alien given the (at least from an European POV) more or less constant gridlock between House, Senate, Presidency and whatever the 50 states make out of that regarding enforcement.
Or, to put it differently, they prefer the Wild West and barely self-regulated markets because they have completely lost any trust in government to create and modernize laws - a viewpoint that does make sense given the ridiculous age of key players in Congress. Feinstein is 90 years old, both likely Presidential candidates are over 75, Senators' median age is 65. How can anyone expect these people to even understand modern issues?!
I think this is also the cause why so many American companies failed or have massive difficulties entering the European market. They simply cannot think that other countries have governments that actually govern and regulatory agencies that don't take it well if foreign companies try to buy their way out of trouble.
That's also the reason why there are so many doomsday preppers in the USA vs. everywhere else on the planet that isn't an active warzone. These people simply don't trust the government to keep them alive in a time of crisis.
[1] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/05/09/louisia...
We have the same net income as the Americans in Europe (ludicrous tech salaries aside), we simply pay collectively with our taxes for stuff that Americans have to pay for on their own, first and foremost healthcare and retirement.
How is it extremely dangerous? Over a hundred million people died in the 20th century from trusting their government too much, nothing compares to that.
The alternative can be seen in France: many have voted Macron purely because he was (and is) better than le Pen and the other parties have all but eroded - and now the country is embroiled in riots because, surprise, the population didn't vote for this shit of a pension reform: they voted to simply not have a fascist in office.
> Over a hundred million people died in the 20th century from trusting their government too much, nothing compares to that.
Hitler's rise to power was precisely the other way around - mainly due the exploding inflation after WW1, an economy hampered by reparations and the subsequent loss of trust in democracy and the government. The people flocked to Hitler because he ran on a platform of scapegoating - Hitler's platform was to blame the "rich Jewish elites" and that their extinction would save the people.
The most troubling thing for me is just how many parallels the rise of Hitler has with our current economic situation. Rampant inflation and explosion of costs of living, government budgets strained by the combined cost of massive economic crises (2008ff financial crisis, euro crisis, migration crisis, COVID, Russian invasion), external enemies to rally the people behind (China), a loss of trust in democracy accompanied by a world-wide rise of charismatic strongmen (Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Xi, Salvini/Meloni), lies and propaganda running unchecked, open violence in the streets... history is repeating itself, right as the last survivors of the 1933-1945 era have died - and those few that are still alive have kept sounding the alarm for years now without being heard.
https://noyb.eu/en/data-protection-authorities-support-noybs...
https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-aims-end-cookie-banner-terror-and-is...
Donate to NOYB if you can.
On the surface level you are right.
But look at the cost of medicine development, it has exponentially risen to billions in the last decades, stifling innovation. And although it maybe got a bit safer, it didn't get exponentially safer.
But regarding the uncertainty, I agree with you. And I guess, it's inevitable given the pace of change and innovation. I am expecting more ISO standards to be created and updated in response to the AI Act, which will limit the uncertainty to some extent.
Are these 140 pages [1] the proposed text?
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/plmrep/COM...
> AI systems which can influence voters in political campaigns and by use of suggestion systems on very large platforms...
> New transparency and risk assessment requirements for providers of (generative) foundation models like GTP.
> Clarified exemptions for research.
Putting these kinds of restrictions in place is absolutely a good thing. While they might not get everything right, this is a step in the right direction. Our laws and understanding as a society has been lagging behind technological development for decades now. That fact has enabled a large amount of exploitation to take place, which has (in the last decade especially) had a large hand in massively undermining our democracies.
This is absurd. For a relatively small sum in the grand scheme of things, I could rent a few A100s, download a free dataset and train a model like LLaMA 30B, which is comparable to GPT3 (and indeed there already are such efforts popping up). Such a law could potentially make it illegal to upload such a thing if you live in the EU without going through a potentially expensive and bureaucratic process. It will completely stifle AI development the same way requiring people to going through a bunch of paperwork to upload a new library would stifle web development.
AI at the moment is moving fast and unreasonable, we already have first waves of victims. Putting a lid on it, and slowing it down seems reasonable, even if it won't be a perfect solution. Interesting part is, this is pretty similar to the situation in 2020, when the pandemia started. Nobody knew exactly what's coming and to navigate it, but everyone tried their best to survive what everyone saw unfolding on global scale.
I guess you meant to say something like "our first wave" rather than "no first wave"?
The internet as a way of distribution is not exactly new, plenty of legislations on various levels have been dealing with that fact for a while, for instance GDPR. "The people writing these regulations" cannot predict the future indeed, but that is obvious. It should not serve as an excuse for doing nothing, though.
I believe the Chinese Communists tried a similar thing[1]. I know you're just being poetic, but let's hope history doesn't repeat.
---
And to be clear, I pretty much agree with your sentiment; the EU is overzealous and the US is light-years ahead in digital tech - and not only or mainly due to regulation. But let’s not pretend the US culture of “just do it and inshallah” is all rainbows and sunshine. With AI in particular there are existential or quasi-existential risks.
lol, there really are not. It's hilarious to see the upper echelons of many government's unironically believing this. they should definitely keep an eye on the development, but as of yet it is not even close to an existential risk.
OpenAI is also playing it safe to some extent, maybe to please the general public and serve the org’s own interests, or maybe they are genuinely concerned about real safety threats, who knows. At any rate their actions don’t align with your discourse.
Sure they do. You can still use GPT-4 now. If GPT-4 was actually an existantial risk they would have shut it down.
So since we're stuck with them, the best thing we can do is to try and prevent this problematic behaviour from taking place. If that somehow fails things are going to get nasty for a while.
But I do have some candidates, say gig-economy delivery apps that bypass minimum wage, and put drivers under auch time pressure that they are always panicking, besides peeing in bottles one of them hit my friend on a motorbike and nearly put him in the hospital.
Many the Deliveroo folks in London are driving illegal ebikes with 1000W motors at 45 km speed. I
Most of then are self-done conversion of $150 bicycle that is not even roadworthy, has old squeky rim brakes, no mirrors or horn or anything.
If I know this, deliveroo knows this, and I am confident that they are knowingly taking advatage of this situation. If they were fully employed, deloliveroo would have to provide them with vehicles, something roadworthy.
For example a Riese & Muller ebike is actually a roadworthy light moped with mirrors, ABS, etc.
Why is my safetu sacraficed to save deliveroo like 2 grand on vehile costs? Are lives so cheap?
The original comment was about how Europe isn't able to nurture technology.
Maybe US economy would be healthier if you did not allow like 3 companies to buy up all the competition.
If you did a like for like equivalent for American technology it can't even compare. You could find small countries in Asia that have done more.
What the author of the original comment is saying is thats not a surprise.
Surely you can't be serious with the EU almost lecturing the world on how AI should work, using Spotify? or even counting ASML and ARM? On what basis?
I would also argue that the labour exploitation is being done by American/European companies.
The point i'm trying to make with the EU is that it doesn't but wants to extraterritorially rule other countries, with no industry knowledge or stakeholders, other than a market to sell to. Where companies exist in question, are mostly American is because their government doesn't hamper development and lets companies thrive in a reasonable way that is balanced and fair.
The EU version is quite overbudensome where the company wont easily exist in the first place and that has no impact into the labour practices to outsourced companies anyway. There are plenty of European companies that manufacture in China and exploit labour - which is a separate argument to the ability for companies to be nurtured to exist.
Is the jury still out on whether software does more good than harm?
I think the only harm an AI can do is the kind that come from errors (human or otherwise). Such as the boeing 737 Max, where people misuse software.
The type of 'harm' that some people attribute to AI such as loss of economic utility, to me, is not harm. And legislating that away is dangerous.
We have no idea about the impact of AI.
It's almost like the EU is regulating stuff that's really scary.
For someone who's more willing to accept risk and who prefers regulating bad outcomes rather than just scary things that could possibly have bad outcomes but which nobody can predict, it looks over-protective. But I fully support the EU's right to take a wait-and-see approach and gradually accept AI if it goes well for the rest of the world.
Europe hasn't been at the forefront of any tech or cultural change for centuries, and seems to be getting along just fine.
"Centuries" is mega hyperbole when you look at physics, chemistry, etc, etc up until at least 1930.
Now the question is: what are they neutering/cultivating.
It might very well end in a "why did we start putting lead in gas again?" / "we can spray kids with DDT clouds right?" x100 moment
The problem is not drugs.
> DDT is classified as "moderately toxic" by the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) and "moderately hazardous" by WHO
> "research has shown that exposure to DDT at amounts that would be needed in malaria control might cause preterm birth and early weaning ... toxicological evidence shows endocrine-disrupting properties; human data also indicate possible disruption in semen quality, menstruation, gestational length, and duration of lactation"
Honest SW innovations that don't aid in monetizing your eye-ball time to make you buys shit, or manipulating your emotions into making you feel insecure, or swaying your vote, don't make nearly as much money as what big-tech does.
Same as stopping food manufacturers from putting arsenic and lead in our food, or the auto industry from making only fuel inefficient air poisoning shitboxes, or big-tobacco who killed more people than the Nazis, the tech industry also needs regulations to protect the consumers, and honestly, it's long overdue and yet people on HN don't want this because they feel like this will stop them from becoming the next Zuckerberg.
You drew the line at software and automobiles, but it's not hard (and not a slippery slope) to authentically draw the line much further. All of civilization is bad for the planet and for us as well. Bread was a mistake.
I prefer this shit is clarified so everyone knows what is legal and not, and not have only the big corporations do the illegal stuff and apologize later.
But Microsoft trained their coding AI with GPL software but not with proprietary software impaling that they can risc screwing Open Source but not the paying GitHub customers or not sure why they did not used their own internal proprietary code.
Open AI trained with the entire inernet, books, ignored any license copyright cponcerns. Stability.ai also trained with lot of stuff. Adobe trained only with stuff they have licenses.
So as we can see until an USA judge decides how to interpret the existing laws then stuff are not sure, some companies take the risks other take less risks, others no risk.
But if USA some other judge in a superior court my decide something else, so IMO USA also needs to take a decision and not let FUD (deserved or not) about AI to spread.
I seen many do not know that the issue ChatGPT had in Italy was about a data leak. There are laws on what you do when this happens, probably are similar laws in USA , maybe in USA is harder to start a investigation or maybe there were some lobbying involved.
Not a surprise all big tech is in US. If EU wants to play this card, US will get even stronger at keeping tech talent.
(I reside neither in the US or EU)
I did consulting and for a fair amount of projects where we had to block all European traffic while GDPR compliance was sorted out. There was almost never anything we had to actually do/change but the threat was looming and it was easier to just not take the risk.
Not necessarily the case. There's many reasons someone would leave the US (or North America in general) for the EU/EEA. The US is becoming less attractive to some given the current political weirdness. There's plenty of interesting work to be done in the EU and EEA that's not "hindered" by GDPR, and many developers who relocate to the EEA actually _like_ GDPR, and regulation aimed towards protecting individual rights. That, at least, is the case for me. Having had the opportunity to relocate anywhere, I ultimately picked the EEA.
The other is Europe
If my license prohibits use of my work for ai training, or requires that any modified code includes my license or credits, or i lack a license, or my web blog doesnt give you permission to train against my content then you shouldnt use it. Google tried hijacking content with amp and ai is not different from it. If you violate my terms then i want to be able to submit evidence - or suspicion - to a government agency that audits or fines you to oblivion. Ideally you have to pay damages equal to the number of people that you may have sold my content to, in full or partially.
This would lead to a win win setup. Artists, developers, writers, lawyers and so on would need compensation for training content - one time or ongoing - leading to higher quality models, job growth and a superior ai product over all.
Ai is by and large a net positive but needs to be done right.
I have been told information should be free, though.
Actually - the government decides the terms of your output by passing laws. Your legal right to your content is that which the law allows. If copyright legislation was revoked tomorrow you'd be howling into the void.
Anti copyright is a bit like communism. What’s the plan? That we all live in one happy commune while the politburo owns everything and we starve in the name of glorious progress? We tried it before and it didnt work.
> What kind of tyranny would allow a handful of corporations to grab my work for free and resell it while making me unemployed?
Again - a presumption that AI will be owned by big tech - it's already out there and runs on your home PC. And it can't be taken back.
Copyright was invented and enforced and the results have been a mixed bag. It seems to suffer from a ratchet effect where the law only ever increases the scope to which copyright applies and never decreases it.
However intuitive your sense of your moral rights are, it's about the net benefit to society and we should be very careful what we wish for.
Seems like we have a classic trolly problem.
On one track, compensating copyright holders is required for LLMs, and it's going to be very expensive to acquire all of this copyrighted info, meaning only the biggest companies can afford to do it.
On the other track, compensating copyright holders is not required, LLMs (led by big tech) capture most of the economic value from every incremental piece of content created by humans in perpetuity, consolidating wealth in the hands of a few shareholders and insiders.
Neither seem ideal.
Whilst history tends to make me suspect the former, the recent leaked Google memo gave me pause for thought. AI is already out there and already can be trained on consumer hardware. It's ever so slightly possible that big tech won't be able to horde the benefits this time.
There is also the third track which is that most abundant code is open source or unlicensed content (which is protected in the US afaik). If corporations can't monetize on it, we win, because models either need to be open source or we need payment for training.
Shareholders can consolidate all the wealth they want, as long as they deliver the goods: LLMs that are trained on all of humanity's creative output.
Curious if the introduction of copyright is what led to an explosion of products and innovation. Suddenly people were given an incentive to monetize their ideas. I doubt the renaissance happened due to a lack of copyright. I think it's more due to social, political and health circumstances rather than the lack of protection of one's work. We, in Europe, suffered from disease, famine, war, to the point where we reached the conclusion that enough is enough - we need rules to the game.
I'm not sure I follow. But even accepting your premise - I'm not sure how it will favour giant companies over anyone else. The models are already in the wild and anyone can use them. In some ways - large companies are less likely to do anything that might open them up to legal risks or PR downsides.
Maybe this is more of a Napster moment than it is a big tech powergrab?
The Google memo covered this in detail and it was what makes me want to question the "AI is owned by big tech" angle.
Surely a more useful metric is sum(all_media.value)
So maybe the correct answer is somewhere in-between
To be fair some of this sounds like a reasonable idea, like prohibiting "remote biometric identification systems in publicly accessible spaces". The issue is that this law would only prohibit using AI to do that. Let's outlaw the things we really don't want (like algorithmic voter influence) in a technology-agnostic way and then let AI flourish.
The other troubling aspect of this is that it's not going to be proportional, but then hard-edged law is a broader problem.
The implication that there is only one way to organize control of AI tech is patently false. We already know that you can have at least i) a state controlled system (China) and ii) an oligopolistic corporate controlled system (US). There are many other plausible ways and the EU must simply create the conditions for these to develop.
Legislation that has real teeth and vision can do this. This is possible even within existing corporate and monetary systems. Even the (controversial) Friedman doctrine about corporation's sole aim is seeking profit is that they must operate with the moral and legal sandbox that society creates.
All they do is keep piling on regs and they're doing it for emerging tech with exactly zero proof of harm.
Also, there aren't 180 countries in the world that are outside of EU.
I think they're reasonable players. They are either well established or have goodish intents. I don't think they ever did anything worse than package internet explorer with Windows.
If by countries you mean “UN member or non-member observer states”, correct.
But that’s pretty much the most conservative count. (And leaves 168 non-EU countries.)
https://support.google.com/bard/answer/13575153?hl=en
Canada, Brazil, WB6 (Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo), Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Moldova, Ukraine, the ones under US sanctions (Syria, North Korea, Iran, Russia, Belarus, China)... plus 27 EU countries. That's 46 right there, and I probably missed a few.
But hey, gotta get those numbers up, so it's available to all of literally zero people living in Heard Island and McDonald Islands or South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.
I ofc can't speak for Google but I know the work I did it was much easier to simply block the EU until compliance was sorted out. It was almost always fine and we didn't have to change anything but it wasn't worth the risk.
I'd be shocked if it never made it to Europe.
> AI systems which can influence voters in political campaigns and by use of suggestion systems on very large platforms
I read that as "targeted advertisement is banned for political campaigns".
> biometric categorisation systems
This brings back the debates on "biased" AI, where people seem to forget that machine learning works on the basis of bias and then go and propose introducing more bias to counteract.
My guess is that we will reach a state where anyone using ML/AI for anything having to do with people will be exposed to a fine, but the EU will apply the rules to it's own discretion against the companies that it does not like.
Regulation can of course be a problem, but it can also do a lot of good to protect consumers. Do people feel this way about the FDA, the FAA, etc?
To a degree sometimes. There is no benefit to regulators to allow for more risk, because they will be blamed if something goes wrong. There's hardly anything to gain (as a regulator) to take risk.
Why should we believe that AI regulation would be any different? Whatever agency is given power won't just stop at reasonable guidelines. They will likely be pressured by big players like Microsoft to choke off open source, by copyright giants like the RIAA and Disney to stop generation, and by every imaginable constituency to protect their jobs from change. Most importantly, individual open-source development will become prohibitive, and AI will be locked behind corporate APIs. In fact, if you look at sites like LessWrong, AI doomers are openly welcoming regulation precisely because they know an FDA-like agency will stop progress dead in its tracks. Make no mistake, AI regulation will hand enormous power to governments and corporations while denying it to the individual, whatever the good intentions were at the beginning. It is a devil's bargain, and if we as an industry are to take it in the name of "safety", we should at least do it with eyes open, instead of pretending that all that is being asked for is "guardrails" and "common sense".
Just so we are clear, I am against this premature neutering of technology.
Can you expound upon this a bit? In my view, we have witnessed astonishing progress in tech over the last few decades.
>neo lib deregulation dream
What is your dream?
Technological advancement might be astonishingly fast but that gives no indication of its value.
10-15 years ago used I knew a good few tech optimists, including myself & would regularly encounter more. Now, I don’t know one, and it’s odd to encounter one. The mood has shifted. VC fuelled platform capitalism has now unfolded.
From earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35901537
Everyone’s deepest dream is an ever kinder society where everyone can thrive. It just gets distorted by short term incentives of power. Hence regulation.
That gives me optimism.
The “EU IA UI” act.
Either Google manages to follow these principles, which to me look aligned to their announced intent for more ethical AI use, or they won’t, and that means their product won’t follow the basic ethical guidelines proposed by the EU, in which case, I’d rather it not be available in the EU (and I don’t understand how anyone would defend a company not ready to address these ethical concerns).
Do you have to wait until every product you use is bureaucratically vetted?
The legislative effort is real, well intentioned, and groundbreaking. It reflects democratically the wishes of half-a-billion people that include some of the fairest and most sensible countries on the planet. So ignore the hallucinating tech bros. EU legislation is certainly in the direction of what a good digital society looks like.
But there is no response on the ground. From the tech makers. Remember the timeless Buckminster Fuller quote: you need to make a new model that makes the old model obsolete. Why aren't there any actors taking the clear legislative signals at heart to create the new digital model?
Here are some hypotheses / flow chart:
* there are no such actors. too much focus on luxury goods, not much on tech. mass migration of talent to the US has created a desert.
* there are actors but they don't get funded to act. If that is the case, we need to ask: there are gazillions of euros rotting, so why is this not happening? Possible causes:
\* financiers don't actually buy the legislative agenda. they think it will be watered down / defanged by the FAANGS
\* financiers belong to a group that doesn't actually *like* this legislative agenda (they bank on surveillance capitalism and the like for guaranteed returns)
but as clearly stated in my comment, this is fighting the old model, not building a new one.
I think it's more of a problem with companies who are fighting to keep the old model (thus, asking for consent where it's not needed just in case they want to do something privacy-disrespectful with it in the future – you can totally deny consent and keep using the service) and consumers not understanding this (and thus, not voting with their feet). But I see GDPR enforcement every day (I donate to https://noyb.eu/en and recommend you to do the same if possible), people fighting non-free consent etc. – I expect in a few more years the landscape will be better understood.
Thanks for the referral, joined as a supporting member :)
Firstly, the EU has a history of crippling their native tech industry to the general detriment of the EU. It is quite possible that this will end up being one more nail in the coffin.
Secondly, they're fighting economics on this one. AI seems to be cheap and accessible. In practice controlling the things that this article discusses is probably going to be impossible. It is like banning communism or nazi-ism - we'd do it if it was possible. It isn't. Attempts to ban the idea just make the whole situation worse. It is well nigh impossible to ban modes of thinking, and AI appears to be one of those.
The primary factor is brain drain. As many experts in geopolitics suggest, the European Union, in collaboration with Russia, could potentially rival, if not surpass, the United States in terms of power. However, it appears they are content to be pawns on the larger chessboard.
Europe got badly screwed. Now Putin is an enemy forever. And he is not going down since all of Russia's powerful people are on a watch list. They have nowhere to go, and so they might as well stick around to the bitter end.
I feel that's the way things have been going culturally/economically in France/Germany: Look at the world (usually the US but now also China more), see what is useful/competitive, adopt it in moderation. So this stance is extremely in line with the usual approach, in my opinion.
I feel 100% OK with being "outcompeted" in this space.
- statutory watermarking of output - disclosure of training data - under age & vulnerability limitations - limitation of indiscriminate publication
welcome to my network, it is decentralised and permissionless.
I cannot wait for EUZ to fail.
On a more serious note, you are aware of the fact that a lot of the material and money Ukraine is gettong comes from European NATO countries and the EU? It is almost like an, whats the word again, alliance supporting Ukraine instead of a single country.
Interesting.
By the way, more than 85% of the funding is coming from the US.
My point really is that even if EU regulations against US big techs are well-intentioned, they’re effectively doing the work for China. I don’t understand what the Chinese have done for the EU. US, on the other hand, have spilled blood to defend the continent.
By now so, the meme of Germany funding Putin by virtue buying gas from Russia is as stale and old as the "they lied about masks" one. Old enough to just not adress anymore.
Furthermore, we almost unanimously agree that murdering others (especially children) is bad. Murder happens all the time.
Eventually, someone is going to release a self-growth-AI on the world.
That event is what we need to prepare for. Everything else is not worth the effort. More so given the time we have to deal with this issue.