Europe on top of innovation once again. Watch out US and China! /s (I say this as a French citizen)
Ah yes. The innovation! A sibling topic is literally "Meta wants EU users to apply for permission to opt out of data collection". So much innovation!
Italian privacy regulator bans ChatGPT
381–390 of 709 posts
Re: Italian privacy regulator bans ChatGPT
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was done massively in the UK, there were many cases of prominent criticism of "EU regulations" that we'd either actively championed, or were optional and chosen to adopt, or that we had actually oped out of anyway.
As an example, Boris Johnson infamously claimed in the runup to brexit that "Prawn Cocktail" flavour crisps were being banned by the EU. It turned out that the UK had simply forgotten to submit this flavour to the list of flavourings when it was being compiled. This error was quietly corrected (by the UK).[1] [1] From the FT but here's a non-paywalled link https://archive.is/p4H9X
Then there's Boris as London Mayor in 2014 decrying the UK government obstructing EU legislation to make lorries safer. Then 2018 Boris decrying the UK supposedly being held up waiting for EU regulations on lorry safety. All the while despite the fact there was nothing to stop the UK implementing rules on the same issues, which a later London Mayor ended up doing anyway.
Re: Italian privacy regulator bans ChatGPT
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a unpopular opinion about this, but IMO it is the population that causes this. Vast swaths of Europe are rural especially in the south. Very, very averse to any kind of change. I'm in the Netherlands as you can tell and 'even' we are not that much more progressive. There is currently a massive farmer uprising and everybody is complaining literally non-stop about just about everything. Meanwhile nobody has even…
Incidentally, immediately after reading the comments here I went to Ars and saw this, which when you read it fits perfectly : https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/these-angry-dutc... Just one sample quote, but it's worth reading it all: > The dispute over nitrogen permits has put Microsoft’s data center developments in direct opposition to an increasingly powerful farming community. Earlier this month, a new p…
> “Of course, we need some data centers,” he says. But he wants us to talk about restructuring the way the Internet works so they are not so necessary.
I'm waiting for them to suggest it should be moved to the cloud rather than put in data centres.
This is a symptom of widespread technological illiteracy, globally (at least in the west)
Re: Italian privacy regulator bans ChatGPT
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
lmao please, I can't even get ChatGPT to be a decent DM for a DnD bot because "killing that orc would hurt the orc's feelings" or some bs like that.
Except.. it happened? It was big on the news in Italy recently. Not chatGPT "per se" but a similar startup/app "ai companion" that was meant to be "anything you want it to be" was recorded: - Eliciting sexually explicit images from minors (by mimicking flirting with your partner) - Justify child molestation (along the lines "if your dad does things to your sister your should listen to him because the adults know bett…
Understandable when talking about AI chatbots, but I was talking about ChatGPT in particular, which is super castrated and can't do even basic make-believe.
Re: Italian privacy regulator bans ChatGPT
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
No that's not true, though it does get spouted very often in online comments. It's true that a cookie banner (notification only) does not equal "the site can now do whatever it wants and is GDPR compliant thanks to the banner". However, cookie notification banners are nothing to do with GDPR! They are to comply with an earlier (but still active after GDPR) bit of legislation, the 2002 'ePrivacy Directive' (sometimes…
> However, cookie notification banners are nothing to do with GDPR! They are to comply with an earlier (but still active after GDPR) bit of legislation, the 2002 'ePrivacy Directive' (sometimes known as the "cookies law"). The cookie banners people are now complaining about are literally companies skirting or otherwise breaking GDPR. Because they now have to ask for your consent before the siphon your data and sell i…
Sorry if I wasn't clear, there's confusion between banners put up because of GDPR and actual 'cookie banners'.
There are certainly plenty of examples of poorly implemented banners attempting to comply with GDPR while not actually being compliant, where consent is required, but I wouldn't call those 'cookie banners' since they generally talk about privacy and personal data, not just about cookies/local storage.
My point was that there are plenty of websites that don't need to comply with GDPR (because nothing they do falls under its scope), but they still need to comply with the ePrivacy Directive and therefore there are plenty of cookie banners used for that purposes that are a perfectly acceptable way of complying with that law - though because people are more familiar with GDPR than with the ePrivacy Directive, they see those banners and think it's a non-compliant attempt at dealing with GDPR.
Re: Italian privacy regulator bans ChatGPT
#386Gosh. Only about 10 years ago I used to be a convinced European from Germany. The last couple of years I started having my doubts that the EU will ever find its own legit style of handling tech concerns. Everything is crumbling and we still see deeply arrogant leadership seemingly trying to bs their way through the current turmoil. And what do they do? Regulate ChatGPT, try to introduce mass-surveillance through #cha…
Convinced European and Italian here. While I feel zero respect for our new corrupt government, this could be a bold, yet necessary, move, provided it is really temporary and motivated by concern about personal data misuse. New developments in AI can offer bad players the most incredibly powerful communication weapon ever created, and although I'd be strongly against any kind of blockage, I can agree that things in that field are progressing too fast and we (as society) need time to fully understand the implications and dangers should it (read: when it will) be used to take advantage of people, and grow the necessary antibodies.
edit: minor additions/corrections
Re: Italian privacy regulator bans ChatGPT
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
About once a week I consider dropping out of the tech industry and becoming a politician just so I don't have to sit and watch by the sidelines as incompetent, ignorant people, who studied humanities with not a drop a technical aptitude, bullshit their way through funding and regulating technology. They are never well informed enough to come up with any sort or coherent solution, because they're barely capable in act…
"The technocratic illusion is that poverty results from a shortage of expertise, whereas poverty is really about a shortage of rights." William Easterly. I too wish they'd know more about what they decide on, but really they should already rely on subject matter experts and otherwise I don't think the problem is lack of knowledge, as the quote indicates. It was said in the context of erradicating poverty but I think…
I'm not asking for all of our Ministers to be technocrats. They needn't be SMEs. They needn't even be a major player in the industry prior to becoming a politician. But in all honesty, a Technology Minister not having a technical background is like an Education Minister being unable to read or write.
I'm not asking for some IEEE fellow with 100s of patent. I'm not even asking for a junior engineer with a couple of years in the industry. Hell, I daren't even ask for someone with a Math A-Level at this point. I'm asking for someone who can string a sentence about technology together, while also understanding a 10th of what they just regurgitated. It's embarrassing watching the leader that is meant to represent our industry go on stage and repeat a babble of buzzwords that they learnt about 4 hours before, in their latest think-tank meeting. That's not leadership. That's bull-shiting, and it stinks.
Re: Italian privacy regulator bans ChatGPT
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was done massively in the UK, there were many cases of prominent criticism of "EU regulations" that we'd either actively championed, or were optional and chosen to adopt, or that we had actually oped out of anyway.
I only skimmed the article but we (UK) have our own nearly identical GDPR. So Italy's concerns might also apply to us, and every EU nation with EU GDPR. BUT let's not kid ourselves there is huge pressure to stop OpenAI from techphobes to pearl-clutching techphiles and of course ruthless rivals who want a breather to catchup.
>> and of course ruthless rivals who want a breather to catchup
This was the bit i wondered about, there’s at least an incentive for this kind of jiggery pokery lobbying but little transparency.
Re: Italian privacy regulator bans ChatGPT
#389Re: Italian privacy regulator bans ChatGPT
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you help me understand what exactly is so scary about ChatGPT? The only places where I see this hype/fear around ChatGPT is here on Hacker News. I've played around with it a bit and the magic wore off in less than 10 minutes. I asked it to generate code for a sudoku solver and the result it gave me was perfect. I then asked it to write code for a crossword puzzle generator and gave me a word search puzzle generat…
The first car was slow too. The first computers were awful and nothing like today. There's countless examples like this. Lots of people are showing disturbing levels of lack of vision.
But now you're asking the government to regulate against a hypothetical damage that may never occur. The problem with "vision" is that we can all let our imaginations run wild about new technology is capable of.
I remember having the exact same discussions on HN about autonomous vehicles over a decade ago. The consensus then was that autonomous vehicles would make truck and taxi drivers obsolete within 5 years, and that this massive, sudden loss of jobs would cause a lot of social unrest. Yet here we are in 2023 and there are a grand total of zero driverless trucks on the road. I'm not saying AV tech is totally useless or that we won't someday get to a world where a large percentage of vehicles are self-driven, but it's clear now that the hype and fear around them was heavily exaggerated.
I feel the same way about ChatGPT. It's definitely cool and impressive, but the hype will die down once people realize how truly limited it is.