Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 424 posts

Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU

#251

Post by DocTomoe »

theyinwhy wrote: post #247
DocTomoe wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU in a nutshell: You can't have nice things, but on the bright side Google/Apple/Facebook won't know what you had for dinner. Now give us your whole financial transaction and travel history, so we can share it with the US, a hostile country, citizen!

Genuinely curious: What are those nice things Europe cannot have?

For starters, I am still waiting for Apple Intelligence to arrive on my phone. Reason given is "EU legislative concerns".

Then there's the nontrivial number of especially local US news sources which now give me a cheerful "451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons" error code.

Then there's the outright stupid stuff - like lightbulbs that do not cost 15 euros a piece (to save 'energy'), or drinking straws that do not dissolve in my coke within the first minute (to avoid 'disposable plastics'). There are hundreds of examples like that.

The EU is a regulation juggernaut, and is making the world an actively worse place for everyone globally. See "Cookie Banners".

Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU

#252

Post by saagarjha »

caseyy wrote: post #200
jeffdotdev wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no law that isn't open to interpretation. There is a reason for the judicial branch of government.

Well, the laws in civil law countries that practice legal literalism are not open to interpretation. Eastern Europe, much of which is a part of the EU, is quite literalist. The understanding is that interpreting laws leads to bias, partiality, and injustice; while following the letter of the law equally in each situation is the most just approach.

Interpreting the law literally is very easy to do in a biased way: you just pick and choose when to do it.

Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU

#253

Post by DocTomoe »

caseyy wrote: post #203
DocTomoe wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all fairness, that would still ban a system that understands my front door being approached by a guy in a postal uniform wearing a parcel is likely unproblematic, while a guy wearing a hoodie and a crowbar is likely to commit a crime.

Not really. Such a system would be evaluating the whole context and not solely profiling the person. What the person is doing (delivering parcel vs cutting a chain link fence) is not a part of their personality or profile. How much danger they’re posing in the moment also isn’t, and so on. Arguably, an AI security system with great objective understanding of the unfolding circumstances would be a lot better than one…

> Develop a system that’s more objective than visual profiling, and the market is yours.

Until another braindead legislator finds another thing he can rally against and throws a stick between my legs.

There are reasons innovation happens in China and - to a lower extend - in the United States. This is one of them.

Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU

#254

Post by kakadu »

hcfman wrote: post #55

Laws that are open to interpretation with drastic consequences if it's interpreted against your favour pose unacceptable risk to business investors and stifle innovation.

Me and my euro mates are not interested in this kid of "innovation".

The "business investors" and "innovators" can take this kind of business elsewhere.

This kind of talk where regulators are assaulted by free marketeers and freedom fighters is unacceptable here.

Let us not misinterpret business people as "innovators", if what they do is not net positive for the society, they do not belong here.

Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU

#255

Post by TeMPOraL »

anothernewdude wrote: post #182
btown wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notably, Recital 12 says the definition "should not cover systems that are based on the rules defined solely by natural persons to automatically execute operations." https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/Glossary/UKPracti... describes a bit of how recitals interact with the operating law; they're explicitly used for disambiguation. So your hip new AI startup that's actually just hand-written regexes under the ho…

> Notably, Recital 12 says the definition "should not cover systems that are based on the rules defined solely by natural persons to automatically execute operations." That's every AI system. It follows the rules defined solely by the programmers (who I suppose might sometimes stretch the definition of natural persons) who made pytorch or whatever framework.

In strict mathematical reading, maybe - depends on how you define "rules", "defined" and "solely" :P. Fortunately, legal language is more straightforward like than that.

The obvious straightforward read is along the lines of: imagine you make some software, which then does something bad, and you end up in court defending yourself with an argument along the lines of, "I didn't explicitly make it do it, this behavior was a possible outcome (i.e. not a bug) but wasn't something we intended or could've reasonably predicted" -- if that argument has a chance of holding water, then the system in question does not fall under the exception your quoted.

The overall point seems to be to make sure systems that can cause harm always have humans that can be held accountable. Software where it's possible to trace the bad outcome back to specific decisions made by specific people who should've known better is OK. Software that's adaptive to the point it can do harm "on its own" and leaves no one but "the system" to blame is not allowed in those applications.

Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU

#256

Post by solatic »

unification_fan wrote: post #108
layer8 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote is inaccurate. The actual wording is: "the placing on the market, the putting into service for this specific purpose, or the use of AI systems to infer emotions of a natural person in the areas of workplace and education institutions, except where the use of the AI system is intended to be put in place or into the market for medical or safety reasons;" and it links to https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/r…

We need to profile your every thought and emotion. Don't worry though, it's for medical or safety reasons only. Same for your internet history... You know, terrorism and all. Can't have that.

Unable to unagree with doubleplusgood reasons

Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU

#257

Post by mjw_byrne »

As with GDPR, the spirit is admirable but the fundamental definitions have been hand-waved. So for the foreseeable future, the expensive lawyers you hire are going to answer the important questions with "well, we don't have much case law yet..."

Also, the definition of AI seems to exclude anything that doesn't "exhibit adaptiveness after deployment". So, a big neural network doing racist facial recognition crime prediction isn't AI as long as it can't learn on-the-fly? Is my naive HTTP request rate limiter "exhibiting adaptiveness" by keeping track of each customer's typical request rate in a float32?

Laws that regulate tech need to get into the weeds of exactly what is meant by the various terms up-front, even if that means loads of examples, clarification etc.

Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU

#258

Post by robin_reala »

DocTomoe wrote: post #251
theyinwhy wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious: What are those nice things Europe cannot have?

For starters, I am still waiting for Apple Intelligence to arrive on my phone. Reason given is "EU legislative concerns". Then there's the nontrivial number of especially local US news sources which now give me a cheerful "451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons" error code. Then there's the outright stupid stuff - like lightbulbs that do not cost 15 euros a piece (to save 'energy'), or drinking straws that do not dissolve…

What are you talking about? Leaving aside your other random complaints that I don’t recognise, but can’t immediately link to, a basic lightbulb is less than €3 for a two-pack: https://www.ikea.com/de/en/p/solhetta-led-bulb-e14-250-lumen...

Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU

#259

Post by chgs »

DocTomoe wrote: post #251
theyinwhy wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious: What are those nice things Europe cannot have?

For starters, I am still waiting for Apple Intelligence to arrive on my phone. Reason given is "EU legislative concerns". Then there's the nontrivial number of especially local US news sources which now give me a cheerful "451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons" error code. Then there's the outright stupid stuff - like lightbulbs that do not cost 15 euros a piece (to save 'energy'), or drinking straws that do not dissolve…

Those are corporations causing the problems, not the eu.

Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU

#260

Post by frereubu »

I always sigh when I see these threads on HN because many of the comments (although not all, thankfully) devolve into US / EU name-calling and wild overgeneralisations.

I would really love to see a Q&A thread like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42770125 from someone who's actually read the documents, practices law in the area, and also understands the difference between US and EU law.

Post reply on HN