Artificial Intelligence Act: MEPs adopt law
europarl.europa.eu
europarl.europa.eu
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.
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.
It's almost as if there is some sort of Platonic ideal of problem solving that we call intelligence, something you can strive for but also someone can poke holes in.
Why not simply use an IQ test? The various multimodal systems coming down the pipe will either improve on taking IQ tests, or stall. If they improve, then they gain more intelligence. If they stall, then they aren't truly intelligent. Just glorified goal to action mappers.
Humans are, by the mere definition of the word, “intelligent”. AI are doing a simulation of that intelligence, the same way a weather model is a simulation of the weather whereas the actual weather isn't a simulation of anything. That doesn't make weather models useless, far from that, but if you trust them blindly when hiking in the mountains, you may end up in a bad place.
> Why not simply use an IQ test?
IQ tests are very limited measurements of what intelligence actually is. Using a thermometer isn't a good way to access the trustfulness of a weather model.
Humans are absolutely not intelligent by definition, that's why words like "unintelligent", "dumb" and "stupid" exist.
The dumbest human is still far more intelligent than any other animal on earth, by construction of our own definition of intelligence.
Of the tests/definitions that separate humans from non-human animals, the three I grew up with were language, tool use, and the mirror test. AI can definitely do the first two — LLMs know far more languages, natural and programming, than I do — and I don't know either way about the third for reasons related to why I am also dubious about how effective it is really.
IMO those tests are not great, and we don't have a meaningful way to put humans and dolphins on the same scale for the same reason you can't meaningfully put a 747 and a Harley Davidson on the same scale for vehicle goodness.
[0] never mind that "race" isn't a real thing
My point is just that we explicitly define intelligence as things humans excel at and other beings don't (and you are right to point out that in the − not so distant − past, the distinctions wasn't so much humans vs other beings but white aristocracy vs other humans).
And we've been doing the same with AI for a while: beating a chess grand master would have been considered an unambiguous proof of intelligence 50 years ago, now I don't think anyone would argue Stockfish is actually intelligent.
Today I realised there's a superficial similarity between mode collapse and confirmation bias. Anyone know if it's just superficial, or if there's a deeper connection?
> Why not simply use an IQ test? The various multimodal systems coming down the pipe will either improve on taking IQ tests, or stall. If they improve, then they gain more intelligence. If they stall, then they aren't truly intelligent. Just glorified goal to action mappers.
It's unclear how useful IQ tests are; there are entirely functional human communities whose members on average perform as badly on some IQ tests as people who need a full-time caretaker because they lack them mental capacity to get dressed or prepare breakfast without assistance. Change the test, those communities suddenly look smart and it's us who look dumb.
The tests have been improved since then, but we've also got problems in the opposite direction — all of the informal measures of intelligence I had growing up are skills where existing AI is now somewhere between a good student[0] (law, medicine, advanced maths, programming) and wildly superhuman (chess skill, languages spoken, arithmetic[1]).
[0] emphasis on "student": you wouldn't want to be treated or represented by a fresh graduate if you could afford better, would you? Nevertheless, if someone told you they had a law degree and a medical degree, this would be considered a sign they were very smart.
[1] when computers were new, they were called "electronic brains"… or rather, when digital computers were new, as the name "computer" was taken from a job that used to be performed by humans.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra
"Deep Blue was intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better." ― Garry Kasparov
I don't care if a statistical model feels anything when analysing pictures of weird lumps to diagnose cancer, I care if it's accurate.
I don't care if a statistical model has hopes and dreams when generating the text of a computer program one textual token at a time, I care if this is risking my future employment.
I don't care if a statistical model has created the same abstraction of the economy that I have when giving me financial advice, I care that it's got a high rate of return at low risk.
I don't care if a statistical model wants to win at chess, or at Go, or at Diplomacy, or at poker, or at paperclip maximisation…
I will care if someone figures out how to do brain uploads, but that's a question for the future.
> I'm not interested in discussing the balance of industry vs government control of our lives.
With you, some level of corporate or government control is inevitable - it is assumed in your answer. This control is (immorally) inflicted on everyone.
I want no extra governmental or corporate strictures. Where's my option? There is none. That's democracy! With laws served up to you by unrelated bureaucrats.
In the future we will need to trust humans to not run those processes with unreliable tools.
This isn't just about AI. How do we trust the humans who manage critical processes to follow good security practices (keeping systems patched, etc)?
* 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?
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!
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.
But of course in a public setting, and/or networked with lots of others with enough scale to start effectively following people through space and time not just capturing one private slice, the metrics all change. So as I watch various AI efforts I'm always thinking about how they address that (or not). I don't think "profit" is even the deciding thing here, something can not be commercial but still potentially a problem at enough scale.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
Mostly just don't use AI to discriminate or manipulate people.
quite light touch and Not at all as bad as I was expecting.
[0]: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/history-artificial-i...
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,...
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20080511165100/http://www.learni...
Edit: The link has since been updated :)
> 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.
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?
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?