The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

In general I find the EU AI act quite reasonable. There are a couple AI uses that will be prohibited (most mentioned by the article, mostly manipulating people or dystopian government stuff). But imho the meat of the act is in categorizing many use cases as "High Risk", which comes with a list of requirements. Things like putting some effort in thinking about risks, into your training data, understanding biases, having documentation and logging, options for manual intervention etc. Most of it wouldn't be out of place in a best-practices guide for deploying AI models (even though obviously most of it is extremely high level)

The people writing these regulations don&#x27;t know what the problems of the future are. The problems of the present are tricky because every problem has a constituency (if it didn&#x27;t it wouldn&#x27;t be a problem.).<p>The EU is trying to get around this by acting quickly before constituencies can develop. This will make no one happy - it&#x27;s like my wife telling me that a car&#x27;s going to hit me if I walk out the front door so she&#x27;s locking me inside. All I&#x27;ll know about is that I can&#x27;t go for a walk. I might hear that the neighbor got hit by a car but I&#x27;ll also hear that they get to go for walks so to the degree the strategy is successful it&#x27;s also to the degree that it fails.

The acceleration of the divergence of the EU from the United States with respect to cutting edge software will be a site to behold. One is neutering and the other is cultivating.

&gt; While the AI Act’s references to copyright issues in generative AI are still very vague and only stress how much of a grey area it is, requiring providers of large models to be more transparent about their sources seems not a bad thing as such. As many aspects of the act it will be seen how this works out in practice.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Ai is by and large a net positive but needs to be done right.

AI is moving too fast to regulate. A lot has happened in the field just during the time that these &quot;last minute amendments&quot; have been discussed. It&#x27;s more likely that the EU will end up with laws that are obsolete by the time they&#x27;re implemented, take forever to revise or repeal, and just sit there constraining innovation for no good reason. For example, if an EU-based startup wants to build a generative AI system to make interior design renders to show off furniture for a magazine (or whatever), how much time and legal expense will the &quot;transparency and risk assessment requirement&quot; add?<p>To be fair some of this sounds like a reasonable idea, like prohibiting &quot;remote biometric identification systems in publicly accessible spaces&quot;. The issue is that this law would only prohibit <i>using AI</i> to do that. Let&#x27;s outlaw the things we really don&#x27;t want (like algorithmic voter influence) in a technology-agnostic way and then let AI flourish.

The problem is still the same as it was with the cookie law: Should we regulate capability or intent? Regulation by capability is easy to specify in the law, but it cripples useful technology as much as predatory technology and thus ends up being just a legal manifestation of technophobia, hindering overall progress. Regulation by intent&#x2F;purpose or actual harm (as opposed to potential harm) is a much better option in my opinion.<p>The other troubling aspect of this is that it&#x27;s not going to be proportional, but then hard-edged law is a broader problem.

I always feel that the EU protects the people, while others seem to care about profits only.

EU AI Act, not EU Act

Funny how all these EU rules come at the detriment of US companies.<p>All they do is keep piling on regs and they&#x27;re doing it for emerging tech with exactly zero proof of harm.

I don&#x27;t why bard isn&#x27;t coming to the EU. Is it this or something else. Google hasn&#x27;t explained it. I would hope that any ai act will allow reasonable players like Openai, Microsoft and Google to continue their good work without ruining into too much red tape. Considering what is happening, if it&#x27;s because of the ai act, the act might be too strict as the EU risks getting disadvantaged by not having access to the same tools as 180 other countries. AI will ultimately prove too useful to ban.

The problem with this is that is is too easy to encompass lots of current uses of data analytics and even primitive AI in its definition. Also, does a simple matrix scoring classify as AI?<p>&gt; AI systems which can influence voters in political campaigns and by use of suggestion systems on very large platforms<p>I read that as &quot;targeted advertisement is banned for political campaigns&quot;.<p>&gt; biometric categorisation systems<p>This brings back the debates on &quot;biased&quot; 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.<p>My guess is that we will reach a state where anyone using ML&#x2F;AI for anything having to do with people will be exposed to a fine, but the EU will apply the rules to it&#x27;s own discretion against the companies that it does not like.

Funny how on the same day we see google announcing that BRAD will not expand into Europe<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35914705" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35914705</a>

I&#x27;m seeing lots of comments from fellow software engineers that seem to boil down to &quot;all software regulation is bad&quot; and I&#x27;d like to know where that&#x27;s coming from, or if it&#x27;s just a minority of the more libertarian-minded among us.<p>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?

I&#x27;m not sure the EU is powerful enough to have their way on AI, USB-C, GDPR and a handful of other things. With a population aging faster than the US&#x27;s it seems like they are spiraling into irrelevance. It could be a market served only by corporations that are willing prop up old tech.

Why do we assume evil? How do our unfounded decisions today affect the possibilities of progress? How easy will it be to repeal these laws when we find the harm they may cause? I would prefer to wait and see.

Is this not an announcement of an announcement?

Thank god for the First Amendment: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;remembering-case-established-code-speech" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;remembering-case-estab...</a>

They could&#x27;ve released this at any point over the last few years, then worked together with industry to refine the conditions. Instead, they waited too long and now it&#x27;s going to be a regulatory mess. The big winners here will be the lawyers.

I hope they put something about user interface there.<p>The “EU IA UI” act.

There’s a reason why Google didn’t release Bard to EU yesterday, expect that to happen more and more as they fall further and further behind.

What the EU is doing is not working.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t there any actors taking the clear legislative signals at heart to create the new digital model?<p>Here are some hypotheses &#x2F; flow chart:<p>* 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.<p>* there are actors but they don&#x27;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:<p><pre><code> \* financiers don&#x27;t actually buy the legislative agenda. they think it will be watered down &#x2F; defanged by the FAANGS \* financiers belong to a group that doesn&#x27;t actually *like* this legislative agenda (they bank on surveillance capitalism and the like for guaranteed returns) </code></pre> Whatever the fundamental challenges and first causes, unless there is bottom-up buildup of alternative approaches the top-down agenda will eventually fail.

In theory I probably do agree with the bill as presented in the article, there are 2 reservations that should be bought up.<p>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.<p>Secondly, they&#x27;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&#x27;d do it if it was possible. It isn&#x27;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.

I don&#x27;t care what EU countries do to curb their productivity. (I am a Korean national.) However, I am worried that another barrier is being built when considering the case of GDPR. And I hope they don&#x27;t intervene in other countries as if their thoughts are universal.

Missing :<p>- statutory watermarking of output - disclosure of training data - under age &amp; vulnerability limitations - limitation of indiscriminate publication

Invoker here,<p>welcome to my network, it is decentralised and permissionless.

I quite frankly don’t care what EU does. They’ve not been innovating at all there. They took a bunch of Chinese money and now they’re doing everything they can to harm US tech firms…while the US is de facto defending them with own tax money in Ukraine.<p>I cannot wait for EUZ to fail.

We have a unique problem here that cannot be solved with legislation. The world government will never agree to it and will use it for power. The citizenry will never agree to it because the government won&#x27;t.<p>Furthermore, we almost unanimously agree that murdering others (especially children) is bad. Murder happens all the time.<p>Eventually, someone is going to release a self-growth-AI on the world.<p>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.

EU is going to legislate itself to irrelevance, missing another tech train that could propel its future. AI ethics won&#x27;t make money.