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I am not expert but there seems to be an overlap in the article between 'AI' and well ... just software, or signal processing: - AI that collects “real time” b

I am not expert but there seems to be an overlap in the article between 'AI' and well ... just software, or signal processing: - AI that collects “real time” biometric data in public places for the purposes of law enforcement. - AI that creates — or expands — facial recognition databases by scraping images online or from security cameras. - AI that uses biometrics to infer a person’s characteristics - AI that collects “real time” biometric data in public places for the purposes of law enforcement. All of the above can be achieved with just software, statistics, old ML techniques, i.e. 'non hype' AI kind of software. I am not familiar with the detail of the EU AI pact but it seems like the article is simplifying important details. I assume the ban is on the purpose/usage rather than whatever technology is used under the hood, right?

pmontra 2y ago
As somebody told me recently, now AI means any program that does something that people think is AI, even if programs doing that thing have been with us for ten years or more with the same degree of accuracy.
PeterStuer 2y ago
Deliniating "AI" from other software is one of the tricky parts of the act and ultimately left as an excercise to the courts. Trying to define it for scope was IMHO a mistake.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nobodywillobsrv 2y ago
The EU and other organizations will be using these to ban data collection and anything to do with protection of the EU. They will interpret "predict" as merely "report" or "act on". This is terrible.
HenryBemis 2y ago
I've worked with the bureaucrats in Brussels on tech/privacy topics. Their deep meaning is "we don't want machines to make decisions". A key point for them has always been "explainability". GDPR has a provision about "profiling" and "automated decision making" for key aspects of life. E.g. if you ask for a mortgage (pretty important life changing/affecting decision) and the bank rejects it you a) can ask them "why" and they MUST explain, in writing, and b) if the decision was made in a system that was fed your data (demographic & financial) you can request that a Human to repeat the 'calculations'. Good luck having ChatGTP explaining. They are trying to avoid having the dystopian nightmare of the (apologies - I don't mean to disrespect the dead, I mean to disrespect the industry) Insurance & Healthcare in the US, where a system gets to decide 'your claim is denied' against humans' (doctors in this case)(sometimes imperfect) consultations because one parameter writes "make X amount of profit above all else" (perhaps not coded with this precise parameter but somehow else). Now, understanding the (personal) data collection and send to companies in the US (or other countries) that don't fall under the Adequacy Decisions [0] and combining that with the aforementioned (decision-making) risks, using LLMs in Production is 'very risky'. Using Copilot for writing code is very much different because there the control of "converting the code to binaries, and moving said binaries to Prod env." (they used to call them Librarians back in the day...), so Human Intervention is required to do code review, code test, etc (just in case SkyNet wrote code to export the data 'back home' to OpenAI, xAI, or any other AI company it came from). I haven't read the regulation lately/in its final text (I contributed and commented some when it was still being drafted), and/but I remember the discussions on the matter. [0]: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/international-dimension-data-protection/adequacy-decisions_en https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/i... EDIT: ultimately we want humans to have the final word, not machines.
frantzmiccoli 2y ago
Statistics and old ML are AI in the sense of that regulation.
amelius 2y ago
You can even replace AI by humans. For example, it is not legal for e.g. police officers to engage in racial profiling.
- uniqueuid 2y ago
  No you cannot, see Article 2: Scope
spacemanspiff01 2y ago
From the laws text: For the purposes of this Regulation, the following definitions apply: (1) ‘AI system’ means a machine-based system that is designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment, and that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments; Related: Recital 12 https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/3/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/3/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/recital/12/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/recital/12/ So, it seems like yes, software, if it is non-deterministic enough would qualify. My impression is that software that simply takes "if your income is below this threshold, we deny you a credit card." Would be fine, but somewhere along the line when your decision tree grows large enough, it probably changes.
- abdullahkhalids 2y ago
  Seems very reasonable. Not all software has the same risk profile, and autonomous+adaptive software certainly have a more dangerous profile than simpler software, and should be regulated differently.
  - johndhi 2y ago
    What? Why? Shouldn't those same use cases all be banned regardless of what tech is used to build them?
    - ImageXav 2y ago
      Not necessarily. Interpretability of a system used to make decisions is more important in some contexts than others. For example, a black box AI used to make judiciary decisions would completely remove transparency from a system that requires careful oversight. It seems to me that the intent of the legislation is to avoid such cases from popping up, so that people can contest decisions made that would have a material impact on them, and that organisations can provide traceable reasoning.
uniqueuid 2y ago
Unfortunately yes, the article is a simplification, in part because the AI act delegates some regulation to existing other acts. So to know the full picture of AI regulation one needs to look at the combination of multiple texts. The precise language on high risk is here [1], but some enumerations are placed in the annex, which (!!!) can be amended by the commission, if I am not completely mistaken. So this is very much a dynamic regulation. [1] https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/6/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/6/
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  Is the regulation itself AI, due to bein adaptive after deployment? Just joking, but I think it is a funny parallel. Also because of it being probably solely human made rules.
impossiblefork 2y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if it does cover all software. After all, chess solvers are AI.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  Chess solvers are more AI than 90% of the things currently being touted as AI!
- Muromec 2y ago
  that's what DORA the explora of your unit tests Act is
teekert 2y ago
Have been having a lot of laughs about all the things we call AI nowadays. Now it’s becoming less funny. To me it’s just generative AI, LLMs, media generation. But I see the CNN folks suddenly getting “AI” attention. Anything deep learning really. It’s pretty weird. Even our old batch processing, SLURM based clusters with GPU nodes are now “AI Factories”.
- xdennis 2y ago
  > To me it’s just generative AI, LLMs, media generation. That's not what AI is. Artificial Intelligence has decades of use in academia. Even a script which plays Tic Tac Toe is AI. LLMs have advanced the field profoundly and gained widespread use. But that doesn't mean that a Tic Tac Toe bot is no longer AI. When a term passes to the mainstream people manufacture their own idea of what it means. This has happened to the term "hacker". But that doesn't mean decades of AI papers are wrong because the public uses a different definition. It's similar to the professional vs the public understanding of the term "prop" in movie making. People were criticizing Alec Baldwin for using a real gun on the set of Rust instead of a "prop" gun. But as movie professionals explained, a real gun is a prop gun. Prop in theater/movies just means property. It's anything that's used in the production. Prop guns can be plastic replicas, real guns which have been disabled, or actually firing guns. Just because the public thinks "prop" means "fake", doesn't mean movie makers have to change their terms.
- sethd 2y ago
  Even the A* search algorithm is technically AI.
  - ykonstant 2y ago
    Oh man, I really want to watch CNN folks try to pronounce Dijkstra!
    - zelphirkalt 2y ago
      die-jick-stra!
    - 2y ago
belter 2y ago
Yes its simplifying. There are more details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42916414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42916414
layer8 2y ago
Yes, you are better off reading the actual act, like the linked article 5: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/5/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/5/ This is not about data collection (GDPR already takes care of that), but about AI-based categorization and identification. "AI system" and other terms are defined in article 3: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/3/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/3/
dathinab 2y ago
> just software, statistics, old ML techniques yes, and with the same problems if applied to the same use cases in the same way in turn they get regulated, too it would be strange to limited a law to some specific technical implementation, this isn't some let's fight the hype regulation but a serious long term effort to regulate automatized decision making and classification processes which pose a increased or high risk to society

pmontra 2y ago

As somebody told me recently, now AI means any program that does something that people think is AI, even if programs doing that thing have been with us for ten years or more with the same degree of accuracy.

PeterStuer 2y ago

Deliniating "AI" from other software is one of the tricky parts of the act and ultimately left as an excercise to the courts. Trying to define it for scope was IMHO a mistake.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

nobodywillobsrv 2y ago

The EU and other organizations will be using these to ban data collection and anything to do with protection of the EU. They will interpret "predict" as merely "report" or "act on". This is terrible.

HenryBemis 2y ago

I've worked with the bureaucrats in Brussels on tech/privacy topics. Their deep meaning is "we don't want machines to make decisions". A key point for them has always been "explainability". GDPR has a provision about "profiling" and "automated decision making" for key aspects of life. E.g. if you ask for a mortgage (pretty important life changing/affecting decision) and the bank rejects it you a) can ask them "why" and they MUST explain, in writing, and b) if the decision was made in a system that was fed your data (demographic & financial) you can request that a Human to repeat the 'calculations'. Good luck having ChatGTP explaining. They are trying to avoid having the dystopian nightmare of the (apologies - I don't mean to disrespect the dead, I mean to disrespect the industry) Insurance & Healthcare in the US, where a system gets to decide 'your claim is denied' against humans' (doctors in this case)(sometimes imperfect) consultations because one parameter writes "make X amount of profit above all else" (perhaps not coded with this precise parameter but somehow else). Now, understanding the (personal) data collection and send to companies in the US (or other countries) that don't fall under the Adequacy Decisions [0] and combining that with the aforementioned (decision-making) risks, using LLMs in Production is 'very risky'. Using Copilot for writing code is very much different because there the control of "converting the code to binaries, and moving said binaries to Prod env." (they used to call them Librarians back in the day...), so Human Intervention is required to do code review, code test, etc (just in case SkyNet wrote code to export the data 'back home' to OpenAI, xAI, or any other AI company it came from). I haven't read the regulation lately/in its final text (I contributed and commented some when it was still being drafted), and/but I remember the discussions on the matter. [0]: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/international-dimension-data-protection/adequacy-decisions_en https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/i... EDIT: ultimately we want humans to have the final word, not machines.

frantzmiccoli 2y ago

Statistics and old ML are AI in the sense of that regulation.

amelius 2y ago

You can even replace AI by humans. For example, it is not legal for e.g. police officers to engage in racial profiling.

uniqueuid 2y ago
No you cannot, see Article 2: Scope

spacemanspiff01 2y ago

From the laws text: For the purposes of this Regulation, the following definitions apply: (1) ‘AI system’ means a machine-based system that is designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment, and that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments; Related: Recital 12 https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/3/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/3/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/recital/12/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/recital/12/ So, it seems like yes, software, if it is non-deterministic enough would qualify. My impression is that software that simply takes "if your income is below this threshold, we deny you a credit card." Would be fine, but somewhere along the line when your decision tree grows large enough, it probably changes.

abdullahkhalids 2y ago
Seems very reasonable. Not all software has the same risk profile, and autonomous+adaptive software certainly have a more dangerous profile than simpler software, and should be regulated differently.
- johndhi 2y ago
  What? Why? Shouldn't those same use cases all be banned regardless of what tech is used to build them?
  - ImageXav 2y ago
    Not necessarily. Interpretability of a system used to make decisions is more important in some contexts than others. For example, a black box AI used to make judiciary decisions would completely remove transparency from a system that requires careful oversight. It seems to me that the intent of the legislation is to avoid such cases from popping up, so that people can contest decisions made that would have a material impact on them, and that organisations can provide traceable reasoning.

uniqueuid 2y ago

Unfortunately yes, the article is a simplification, in part because the AI act delegates some regulation to existing other acts. So to know the full picture of AI regulation one needs to look at the combination of multiple texts. The precise language on high risk is here [1], but some enumerations are placed in the annex, which (!!!) can be amended by the commission, if I am not completely mistaken. So this is very much a dynamic regulation. [1] https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/6/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/6/

zelphirkalt 2y ago
Is the regulation itself AI, due to bein adaptive after deployment? Just joking, but I think it is a funny parallel. Also because of it being probably solely human made rules.

impossiblefork 2y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if it does cover all software. After all, chess solvers are AI.

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
Chess solvers are more AI than 90% of the things currently being touted as AI!
Muromec 2y ago
that's what DORA the explora of your unit tests Act is

teekert 2y ago

Have been having a lot of laughs about all the things we call AI nowadays. Now it’s becoming less funny. To me it’s just generative AI, LLMs, media generation. But I see the CNN folks suddenly getting “AI” attention. Anything deep learning really. It’s pretty weird. Even our old batch processing, SLURM based clusters with GPU nodes are now “AI Factories”.

xdennis 2y ago
> To me it’s just generative AI, LLMs, media generation. That's not what AI is. Artificial Intelligence has decades of use in academia. Even a script which plays Tic Tac Toe is AI. LLMs have advanced the field profoundly and gained widespread use. But that doesn't mean that a Tic Tac Toe bot is no longer AI. When a term passes to the mainstream people manufacture their own idea of what it means. This has happened to the term "hacker". But that doesn't mean decades of AI papers are wrong because the public uses a different definition. It's similar to the professional vs the public understanding of the term "prop" in movie making. People were criticizing Alec Baldwin for using a real gun on the set of Rust instead of a "prop" gun. But as movie professionals explained, a real gun is a prop gun. Prop in theater/movies just means property. It's anything that's used in the production. Prop guns can be plastic replicas, real guns which have been disabled, or actually firing guns. Just because the public thinks "prop" means "fake", doesn't mean movie makers have to change their terms.
sethd 2y ago
Even the A* search algorithm is technically AI.
- ykonstant 2y ago
  Oh man, I really want to watch CNN folks try to pronounce Dijkstra!
  - zelphirkalt 2y ago
    die-jick-stra!
  - 2y ago

belter 2y ago

Yes its simplifying. There are more details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42916414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42916414

layer8 2y ago

Yes, you are better off reading the actual act, like the linked article 5: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/5/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/5/ This is not about data collection (GDPR already takes care of that), but about AI-based categorization and identification. "AI system" and other terms are defined in article 3: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/3/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/3/

dathinab 2y ago

> just software, statistics, old ML techniques yes, and with the same problems if applied to the same use cases in the same way in turn they get regulated, too it would be strange to limited a law to some specific technical implementation, this isn't some let's fight the hype regulation but a serious long term effort to regulate automatized decision making and classification processes which pose a increased or high risk to society