Here is the actual press release.<p>><a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20231206IPR15699/artificial-intelligence-act-deal-on-comprehensive-rules-for-trustworthy-ai" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20231206IP...</a>
As much as I am worried about the unintended consequences of AI being released, (a) I suspect this stage might be a little oversold (as great as it is), and (b) we should give it a little more time to play out to make more informed decisions.
<i>Some practices, such as the indiscriminate scraping of images from the internet to create a facial recognition database, would be banned outright.</i><p>Sounds like the devil is in the details. What if you scrape a large quantity of images and the end result just happens to be able to recognize many faces?<p>Hosted services like ChatGPT can "solve" this by refusing to identify faces, and if you hack around it with prompt engineering, well, they can tell the EU that they tried.<p>Open source models that can handle images, though? Hopefully this regulation does not end up forbidding the use of general-purpose open source models.
Full text mirror: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20231208225306/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/technology/eu-ai-act-regulation.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://web.archive.org/web/20231208225306/https://www.nytim...</a>
For anyone with uBlock origin running into the paywall, import this filter list:<p><a href="https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters/-/raw/main/bpc-paywall-filter.txt" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filter...</a>
> Use of facial recognition software by police and governments would be restricted outside of certain safety and national security exemptions. Companies that violated the regulations could face fines of up to 7 percent of global sales.<p>So a 7% tax on developing/deploying such systems. Not a bad deal.
The laws actually seem reasonable. The amount of spin in the article is unbelievable, I almost fell for it myself as the false narrative presented fits neatly with EU's reputation of being anti-innovation which also aligns with my general position on the EU (having lived there for a few years, I can say there is some truth to it).<p>That said, as a libertarian I generally oppose such laws that restrict freedom in such a specific way. I think there should be simpler and more general laws centered around harm. If some action results in individual harm and it does not yield a net social benefit (for society as a whole) then the victims should be able to obtain damages from the perpetrator.
> While trying to protect against its possible risks, like automating jobs, spreading misinformation online and endangering national security.<p>Automating jobs isn't a risk, it's the main feature. I can't wait for a future in which human will have to do little actual work besides what they feel like doing.
Cue an increase in the number of "I can't believe this new service is blocked in the EU!" comments, along with "pff, I don't like advanced new technology anyway" copium.
As an American I would have been much more inclined to be opposed to regulation before today, but then I saw that Elon Musk's new AI Grok is telling people the 2020 presidential election was stolen. We have to have some rule to prevent this sort of thing:<p><a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/18duaoi/elon_musks_grok_ai_released_yesterday_is_telling/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/18duaoi/elon_musks...</a>