In the end, it doesn’t matter how Biden defines it. We are signatories to the UN and the UN definition in Article II of the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” is:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
a) Killing members of the group;
b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Note the language: “ANY of the following acts”.
Israel is now 5/5 with the relocation of children from Gaza to the West Bank.
I guess? I want to know in general what the regulations do to things that aren’t algorithm usage by police/banks/etc. so what would the impact be on the more recent LLMs like GPT and Mistral and the image-gens like SD etc.?
My main concern is restrictions on FOSS alternatives. If corpos are the only ones who can in practice have AI due to licensing fees etc, then everything is completely lost.
Cool. I wrote a fairly lengthy post on that in the comments here.
I don’t think they are in compliance with EU law. You can still possess and use them legally, but businesses that offer them to EU residents may be fined. Unless I missed something, private use, even professional use (EG for writing code) is fine. You wouldn’t want to build a business around hosting open models in the EU, though.
Any word on the final legislation’s treatment of free and open source models? At the drafting stage, there were warnings that the requirements would basically shut out FOSS projects, thereby entrenching proprietary models from tech giants. Later on, there was talk about possibly adding carve-outs to protect FOSS, but I couldn’t find the details.
There are some carve-outs for FOSS, but. The biggest problem is that the copyright lobby got in a body blow. It won’t be enough to make the IP fanatics of lemmy happy, but it’ll make some people money.
Model makers must have a policy in place to ensure compliance with the EU copyright directive. That means that websites can use a machine-readable opt-out from AI training. I think this is a big reason why we’re now hearing about these deals with reddit and other copyright holders.
Also, model makers must create a summary of the copyrighted training data used. The AI office, which is supposed to enforce this act, is to provide a template for a sufficiently detailed summary. A lot will depend on the AI office and the courts.
A couple problems are obvious. Many enthusiasts will not bother with the paperwork. What will that mean for Hugging Face? Or the AI Horde? The EU is certainly the wrong place to build a business around hosting AI models.
The current open models will likely become “illegal”. The makers would have to retroactively provide then necessary documentation, but why would they bother? Even if they did, there is the question about the policy regarding the opt-out. Mind, that doesn’t outlaw possession or use. It simply means that businesses may be fined for providing downloads or inference to EU residents.
I think this will likely have a chilling effect on open models. EG Meta could simply say that “Llama 4”, if it were to come, is off-limits in the EU. But that might not be enough to indemnify them. Or they could try to comply, which would cost them money for no clear gain. And/or they’d have to leave out data without regard for quality.
Research institutions are not bound by the opt-out. They might become a source of open models.
The carve-outs also do not apply to so-called high-risk AI systems. That would make sense if the act made sense.
LLMs, image diffusion models, and such are termed GPAI (general purpose AI). They are not considered high-risk, by default. They are considered high-risk only once they are adapted to a high-risk purpose. Of course, the line isn’t that clear. Say, a teacher could use an LLM to grade tests. Regulators might cause problems there.
Thanks for the information! It’s pretty distressing that the EU, in its zeal to do the right thing, seems to be protecting the big AI companies from FOSS competition.
This is one of those cases where no one agrees what “the right thing” is. Owners think it’s right that they collect rent from their property. Me, I think the wider interests of society take precedence.
When the copyright directive was passed in 2019, there was a lot of opposition to it. The guy who had a lot of say as a (sorta) committee chair was the same one who now oversaw the AI act. Few people at the time care that it regulated AI training. I think the lobbying came mainly from academics who understood that the oppressive IP laws in many EU countries made ML all but illegal. I’m sure, if the copyright industry had foreseen the importance of the AI training provisions, the situation would be much worse for the EU now.
Unfortunately, the people who might argue for the wider interests of society don’t have the wherewithal to meaningfully contribute here. Few people know what AI is, and no one knows what it will be in a few years. There is a lot of rubbish in the act that will do more harm than good, in the name of protecting society. But because it is so ill thought out, I doubt it will do much either way. The copyright fanatics were the real damage dealers.
It is and it has been since 1787, but there’s no functional difference between a law not being enforced and the thing the law’s about being legal.
(Art. I, § 9, cl. 8): “[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
(Art. II, § 1, cl. 7): “The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.”
(Art. I, § 6, cl. 2): “No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time; and no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office.”
Wouldn’t it just be easier to enforce the one that’s already a law. And if what is already a law isn’t being enforced then, what makes this new law more enforceable?
I haven’t forgot, just like i haven’t forgot the administration has threatened sanctions to the international criminal court because they have evidence of US backed genocide.
It absolutely would. Unfortunately, if I remember the details of this circus when it was happening, there are no criminal penalties attached to those amendments, so the only people who can do anything about it are Congress. And what happens if Congress is controlled by your party? Well, exactly what happened when Trump was impeached twice for actions that were at least as significant…
(Art. I, 9, cl. 8): "[NJo Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State’
Unfortunately this doesn’t sufficiently cover things like 'Random Russian Billionaire Oligarch" so long as there is the slightest modicum of a veil of separation from “any King, Prince or State”.
So for example, as long as Putin secretly tells his billionaire buddy to go pay off Trump and to keep it hush hush, this clause is even more toothless than it already is in practice.
There was quite a bit of speculation that we would do the formal recognition yesterday and I suppose this announcement is essentially it as nothing will stop it.
I wonder if the extra few days before formal recognition is to allow some on the fence to join in / possibly to allow for the slow wheels of bureaucracy to turn. I’m not sure what legal steps have to be taken to formally recognise a country. I don’t suppose it happens very often.
It’s no surprise to me that they’ve recalled their ambassador. Quite a few opposition politicians here have been calling for the expulsion anyway so it seemed like an inevitability.
There’s a fair bit of work. The biggest obstacle is all the random form entries that need to be modified. It’s not like it’s a single central table, it’s the same table copy and pasted a million times. Then for most countries you’d need to add recognition of their passports, their national ID’s, update legislation on whether nationals of that state are afforded certain protections or not certain visa requirements or not, etc. It truly can take years.
In most cases one country becomes two or two become one. In the first case everyone can use the old country on forms and the old country’s rules apply to everyone until changed. In the second case you can use the country your passport was issued from or both or whatever. But there is less of a change.
For Palestine, it’s just poofing into existence. They don’t get passports. They don’t have any existing relations. So I imagine this announcement will take a while to be formalized fully but there will be some interim order that basically says what you need to do manually if you encounter a Palestinian and your automated systems can’t process it.
With all our experience from the last plague this one should be a breeze where everyone quarantines, vaccinates, and masks as needed. Yeah we’ll be fine
Why limit it to foreign governments, and why limit it to the president?
Hell why not limit congress and the president to the conditions of the lowest quartile?
It’s not like billionaires and corporations interests are any more aligned with the people than foreign governments. This has the bonus effect of essentially banning Trump if he doesn’t want to give up his wealth.
“The bill would prevent high-ranking officials, also including members of Congress, from receiving payments directly or indirectly from foreign governments through businesses they control and create penalties for unauthorized acceptance of foreign payments. The ban would apply for two years after leaving office unless Congress authorized an exception.”
That and due to the vast majority of federal elections involving AIPAC funding for or against at least one of the candidates.
AIPAC bribes and/or blackmails almost all of Washington. They’re the ethnostate equivalent of the fossil fuel lobby and intimately intertwined with the military industrial complex.
Specific laws are often needed in order to enforce the constitution. Legislation can go into greater detail and eliminate ambiguities and grey areas. And it can add an actual enforcement mechanism, since the constitution doesn’t generally include any actual penalties.
That also means that law enforcement agencies can pursue those cases. That’s a hell of a lot better than relying on congress to impeach someone.
This particular bill might be redundant, but only if existing laws adequately cover these issues. I’m not familiar enough with current laws on the topic to say one way or the other. Not that it matters much when this bill has no chance of becoming law anyway.
Specific laws are often needed in order to enforce the constitution.
I realize what you say is true in practice, but JFC it’s so fucked up. If a provision of the Constitution can’t be enforced without legislation, then that part of the Constitution is simply meaningless. Why do we accept judges treating the Constitution as nothing more than a polite suggestion to Congress?
reuters.com
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