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
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.
Is the jury still out on whether software does more good than harm?
The other is Europe
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)
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.
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
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.
Safety regulations exist in every major industry, and sometimes it slows some progress for the sake of individuals. This isn't a bad thing.
So in effect the eu is protecting it’s citizens work from theft and companies from unethical competition.
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?
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'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.
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.
A funny but probably true prediction. Brussels loves handing money to PTTs the way the US Congress loves handing it out to Raytheon.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
As well as giving the power to a judge to punish companies if the public sentiment goes negative.
Are these 140 pages [1] the proposed text?
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/plmrep/COM...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have been told information should be free, though.
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.
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.)
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?
Just so we are clear, I am against this premature neutering of technology.
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.
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".
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 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.
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.
All they do is keep piling on regs and they're doing it for emerging tech with exactly zero proof of harm.
> 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.
The “EU IA UI” act.
- 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.
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.