Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn’t matter what it requires, the point is as usual, the EU doesn’t take into account the unintended consequences of laws it passes when it comes to technology. That partially explains the state of the tech industry in the EU. But guess which had a more deleterious effect on Facebook ad revenue and tracking - Apples ATT or the GDPR?
I love hearing pointificarions about unintended consequences from Americans and especially from Americans in tech. No, being free to abuse others is not a positive feature. Not for tech, not for politics, not for business.
AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU
341–350 of 424 posts
Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that the GDPR has been largely a failure protecting citizens from corporations, but it has hurt everyone else. - Nothing has changed in Facebook and Google data collection practices, who with other bug corps account for > 90% of data collection - Many mid tier competitors lost market share, focusing power to Google - EU small software companies pay estimated extra 400 EUR/year to satisfy GDPR complianc…
I will be honest, I am always very skeptical of these claims that the big tech companies are fine but small business is hurting. Many of them seem to originate with the big tech companies themselves and I highly doubt they really have the interests of small business in mind. Plus, I'm old enough to remember when everyone claimed EU tech law was about to ban memes, which didn't happen...
Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU
#343Europe's tech sector will continue to wither as America and others surge ahead.
You can't regulate your way to technological leadership.
Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a lawyer, not versed in US and EU Law, but ... I read (part) of the regulation. https://outofthecomfortzone.frantzmiccoli.com/thoughts/2024/... and here is my shameless plug.
Not a lawyer, only an engineer starting to assess our AI models. Your comparison to GDPR seems to be correct in a way, both are quite vague and wide. The implementation of GDPR is still unclear in certain situations and it was even worse when it was launched, the EU AI act have very little references to work with and except for very obvious area it is still a lot of a guesswork
On the other hand, if you're concerned about AI risk, I don't see how it could be otherwise. We don't have a clear grasp about what the real limits of capabilities are. Some people are promising "AGI" "just around the corner". Other people are spinning tales about gray goo. The risk of automated discrimination looms large since IBM sold Hollerith collation machines to the Holocaust.
If it delays AI "innovation" by forcing only the deployment of solutions which have had at least some check by legal to at least try to avoid harming citizens, that's ... good?
Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem is that the GDPR has been largely a failure protecting citizens from corporations, but it has hurt everyone else. This is just laughably incorrect. Literally every Fortune 500 that I work with who has operations in Europe has an entire team that owns GDPR compliance. It is one of the most successful projects to curtail businesses treating private data like poker chips since HIPAA.
Is their job to reduce private data to the minimum needed, or the maximum allowed?
Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will be honest, I am always very skeptical of these claims that the big tech companies are fine but small business is hurting. Many of them seem to originate with the big tech companies themselves and I highly doubt they really have the interests of small business in mind. Plus, I'm old enough to remember when everyone claimed EU tech law was about to ban memes, which didn't happen...
We saw a bunch of small side project type of sites from the EU close down all over HN after GDPR became a thing. The risk for someone small is too high. The minimum fines are in the millions.
Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU
#347Earlier 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…
It doesn't seem to be clear to me whether auto-formatted code (or even generated code from copilot for example) would be classified as AI.
If you use Copilot to generate code by essentially just letting it autocomplete the entire code base with little supervision, yeah, sure, that might maybe fall under this law somehow.
If you use Copilot like you would use autocomplete, i.e. by letting it fill in some sections but making step-by-step decisions about whether the code reflects your intent or not, it's not functionally different from having written that code by hand as far as this law is concerned.
But looking at these two options, nobody actually does the first one and then just leaves it at that. Letting an LLM generate code and then shipping it without having a human first reason about and verify it is not by itself a useful or complete process. It's far more likely this is just a part of a process that uses acceptance tests to verify the code and then feeds the results back into the system to generate new code and so on. But if you include this context, it's pretty obvious that this indeed would describe an "AI system" and the fact there's generated code involved is just a red herring.
So no, your gotcha doesn't work. You didn't find a loophole (or anti-loophole?) that brings down the entire legal system.
Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU
#348Seems like a mostly reasonable list of things to not let AI do without better safety evals. > AI that tries to infer people’s emotions at work or school I wonder how broadly this will be construed. For example if an agent uses CoT and they needs emotional state as part of that, can it be used in a work or school setting at all?
I would imagine that such a tool to infer emotional states would be most useful for autistic people who are as I can attest, somewhat handicapped upon that front. Maybe that will get challenged as disability discrimination by some Autistic group. Which would be interesting. As with most things, there are rules, and exceptions to those rules - no shoe fits everyone, though forcing people to wear the wrong shoe size, c…
Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU
#349The EU once again races toward premature regulation. Europe's tech sector will continue to wither as America and others surge ahead. You can't regulate your way to technological leadership.
Re: AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuinely curious: What are those nice things Europe cannot have?
Well, most things, considering the absolutely pathetic average salary, the rising cost of living, and the ever-increasing tax burden.