One of the key aspects of the act is how a model provider is responsible if the downstream partners misuse it in any way. For open source, it's a very hard requirement[1].
> GPAI model providers need to establish reasonable copyright measures to mitigate the risk that a downstream system or application into which a model is integrated generates copyright-infringing outputs, including through avoiding overfitting of their GPAI model. Where a GPAI model is provided to another entity, providers are encouraged to make the conclusion or validity of the contractual provision of the model dependent upon a promise of that entity to take appropriate measures to avoid the repeated generation of output that is identical or recognisably similar to protected works.
[1] https://www.lw.com/en/insights/2024/11/european-commission-r...
For reference, see every highly-regulated industry everywhere.
You think Sam Altman was in testifying to the US Congress begging for AI regulation because he's just a super nice guy?
Same way the pols aren’t futurists and perfect neither is anyone else. Everyone should sit at the table and discuss this like adults.
You want to go live in the hills alone, go for it, Dick Proenneke. Society is people working collectively.
So I disagree, probably Europe will be even more behind in ev if they doesn't push eu manufacturers to invest so heavily in the industry.
You can se for example than for legacy manufacturers the only ones in the top ten are Europeans being 3 out of 10 companies, not Japanese or Korean for example, and in Europe Volkswagen already overtake Tesla in sales Q1 for example and Audi isn't that much away also.
In the end the regulation was diluted to something that made sense(ish) but that process took about 4 years. It also slowed down all enterprise deals because no one knew if a deal was going to be against GDPR and the lawyers defaulted to “no” in those orgs.
Asking regulators to understand and shape market evolution in AI is basically asking them to trade stocks by reading company reports written in mandarin.
LLMs are hardly reliable ways to reproduce copyrighted works. The closest examples usually involve prompting the LLM with a significant portion of the copyrighted work and then seeing it can predict a number of tokens that follow. It’s a big stretch to say that they’re reliably reproducing copyrighted works any more than, say, a Google search producing a short excerpt of a document in the search results or a blog writer quoting a section of a book.
It’s also interesting to see the sudden anti-LLM takes that twist themselves into arguing against tools or platforms that might reproduce some copyrighted content. By this argument, should BitTorrent also be banned? If someone posts a section of copyrighted content to Hacker News as a comment, should YCombinator be held responsible?
Only because the companies are intentionally making it so. If they weren't trained to not reproduce copyrighted works they would be able to.
Blaming tools for the actions of their users is stupid.
In some cases they can be prompted to guess a number of tokens that follow an excerpt from another work.
They do not contain all copyrighted works, though. That’s an incorrect understanding.
Commercial use of someone's image also already has laws concerning that as far as I know, don't they?
They're not really "blaming" the tool though. They're using a supply chain attack against the subset of users they're interested in.
This is European law, not US. Reasonable means reasonable and judges here are expected to weigh each side's interests and come to a conclusion. Not just a literal interpretation of the law.
I did not read it yet, only familiar with the previous AI Act https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/ .
If I'd were to guess Meta is going to have a problem with chapter 2 of "AI Code of Practice" because it deals with copyright law, and probably conflicts with their (and others approach) of ripping text out of copyrighted material (is it clear yet if it can be called fair use?)
Yes.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyrig...
Though the EU has its own courts and laws.
We have exceptions, which are similar, but the important difference is that courts decide what is fair and what is not, whereas exceptions are written in law. It is a more rigid system that tend to favor copyright owners because if what is seen as "fair" doesn't fit one of the listed exceptions, copyright still applies. Note that AI training probably fits one of the exceptions in French law (but again, it is complicated).
I don't know the law in other European countries, but AFAIK, EU and international directives don't do much to address the exceptions to copyright, so it is up to each individual country.
And acquiring the copyrighted materials is still illegal - this is not a blanket protection for all AI training on copyrighted materials
Unless the courts are willing to put injunctions on any model that made use of illegally obtained copyrighted material - which would pretty much be all of them.
https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/introduction-to-code-of...
It’s certainly onerous. I don’t see how it helps anyone except for big copyright holders, lawyers and bureaucrats.
Essentially, the goal is to establish a series of thresholds that result in significantly more complex and onerous compliance requirements, for example when a model is trained past a certain scale.
Burgeoning EU companies would be reluctant to cross any one of those thresholds and have to deal with sharply increased regulatory risks.
On the other hand, large corporations in the US or China are currently benefiting from a Darwinian ecosystem at home that allows them to evolve their frontier models at breakneck speed.
Those non-EU companies will then be able to enter the EU market with far more polished AI-based products and far deeper pockets to face any regulations.
Most of these items should be implemented by major providers…
This really is the 2025 equivalent to posting links to a google result page, imo.
Oh ma dey have popups. We need dem too! Haha, we happy!
The regulations came along, but nobody told marketing how to do their job without the cookies, so every business site keeps doing the same thing they were doing, but with a cookie banner that is hopefully obtrusive enough that users just click through it.
Companies did that and thoughtless website owners, small and large, who decided that it is better to collect arbitrary data, even if they have no capacity to convert it into information.
The solution to get rid of cookie banners, as it was intended, is super simple: only use cookies if absolutely necessary.
It was and is a blatant misuse. The website owners all have a choice: shift the responsibility from themselves to the users and bugger them with endless pop ups, collect the data and don’t give a shit about user experience. Or, just don’t use cookies for a change.
And look which decision they all made.
A few notable examples do exist: https://fabiensanglard.net/ No popups, no banner, nothing. He just don’t collect anything, thus, no need for a cookie banner.
The mistake the EU made was to not foresee the madness used to make these decisions.
I’ll give you that it was an ugly, ugly outcome. :(
Writing policy is not supposed to be an exercise where you “will” a utopia into existence. Policy should consider current reality. if your policy just ends up inconveniencing 99% of users, what are we even doing lol?
I don’t have all the answers. Maybe a carrot-and-stick approach could have helped? For example giving a one time tax break to any org that fully complies with the regulation? To limit abuse, you could restrict the tax break to companies with at least X number of EU customers.
I’m sure there are other creative solutions as well. Or just implementing larger fines.
It's not madness, it's a totally predictable response, and all web users pay the price for the EC's lack of foresight every day. That they didn't foresee it should cause us to question their ability to foresee the downstream effects of all their other planned regulations.
1. Consent to be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous and as easy to withdraw as to give 2. High penalties for failure to comply (€20 million or 4 % of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher)
Compliance is tricky and mistakes are costly. A pop-up banner is the easiest off-the-shelf solution, and most site operators care about focusing on their actual business rather than compliance, so it's not surprising that they took this easy path.
If your model of the world or "image of humanity" can't predict an outcome like this, then maybe it's wrong.
And that is exactly the point. Thank you. What is encoded as compliance in your example is actually the user experience. They off-loaded responsibility completely to the users. Compliance is identical to UX at this point, and they all know it. To modify your sentence: “and most site operators care about focusing on their actual business rather than user experience.”
The other thing is a lack of differentiation. The high penalities you are talking about are for all but of the top traffic website. I agree, it would be insane to play the gamble of removing the banners in that league. But tell me: why has ever single-site- website of a restaurant, fishing club and retro gamer blog a cookie banner? For what reason? They won’t making a turnover you dream about in your example even if they would win the lottery, twice.
Edit: from the linked in post, Meta is concerned about the growth of European companies:
"We share concerns raised by these businesses that this over-reach will throttle the development and deployment of frontier AI models in Europe, and stunt European companies looking to build businesses on top of them."
Meta has never done and will never do anything in the general public's interest. All they care about is harvesting more data to sell more ads.
Am I the only one who assumes by default that European regulation will be heavy-handed and ill conceived?
The EU AI regulation establishes complex rules and requirements for models trained above 10^25 FLOPS. Mistral is currently the only European company operating at that scale, and they are also asking for a pause before these rules go into effect.
It was a decade too late and written by people who were incredibly out of touch with the actual problem. The GDPR is a bit better, but it's still a far bigger nuisance for regular European citizens than the companies that still largely unhindered track and profile the same.
Newer regulations also mandate that "reject all cookies" should be a one click action but surprisingly compliance is low. Once again, the enemy of the customer here is the company, not the eu regulation.
The odds of the EU actually hitting a useful mark with these types of regulations, given their technical illiteracy, it's is just astronomically unlikely.
Meanwhile, nobody in China gives a flying fuck about regulators in the EU. You probably don't care about what the Chinese are doing now, but believe me, you will if the EU hands the next trillion-Euro market over to them without a fight.
Since you then admit to "assume by default", are you sure you are not what you complain about?
Europeans are still essentially on Google, Meta and Amazon for most of their browsing experiences. So I'm assuming Europe's goal is not to compete or break American moat but to force them to be polite and to preserve national sovereignty on important national security aspects.
A position which is essentially reasonable if not too polite.
When push comes to shove the US company will always prioritize US interest. If you want to stay under the US umbrella by all means. But honestly it looks very short sighted to me.
After seeing this news https://observer.co.uk/news/columnists/article/the-networker..., how can you have any faith that they will play nice?
You have only one option. Grow alternatives. Fund your own companies. China managed to fund the local market without picking winners. If European countries really care, they need to do the same for tech.
If they don't they will forever stay under the influence of another big brother. It is US today, but it could be China tomorrow.
Feels like I need to go find a tech site full of people who actually like tech instead of hating it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44609135
That feeling is correct: this site is better without you. Please put your money where your mouth is and leave.
I don't like meta or anything it has done, or stands for
The European government has at least a passing interest in the well being of human beings while that is not valued by the incentives that corporations live by
Perhaps it's easier to actually look at the points in contention to form your opinion.
Maybe some think that is a good thing - and perhaps it may be - but I feel it's more likely any regulation regarding AI at this point in time is premature, doomed for failure and unintended consequences.
How long can we let AI go without regulation? Just yesterday, there was a report here on Delta using AI to squeeze higher ticket prices from customers. Next up is insurance companies. How long do you want to watch? Until all accountability is gone for good?
If I had to pick a connector that the world was forced to use forever due to some European technocrat, I would not have picked usb-c.
Hell, the ports on my MacBook are nearly shot just a few years in.
Plus GDPR has created more value for lawyers and consultants than it has for EU citizens.
I don't know how this problem is so much worse with USB-C or the physics behind it, but it's a very common issue.
This port could be improved for sure.
Monetary value, certainly, but that’s considering money as the only desirable value to measure against.
That time and effort wasted on consultants and lawyers could have been spent on more important problems or used to more efficiently solve the current one.
Who's to say USB-C is the end-all-be-all connector? We're happy with it today, but Apple's Lightning connector had merit. What if two new, competing connectors come out in a few year's time?
The EU regulation, as-is, simply will not allow a new technically superior connector to enter the market. Fast forward a decade when USB-C is dead, EU will keep it limping along - stifling more innovation along the way.
Standardization like this is difficult to achieve via consensus - but via policy/regulation? These are the same governing bodies that hardly understand technology/internet. Normally standardization is achieved via two (or more) competing standards where one eventually "wins" via adoption.
Well intentioned, but with negative side-effects.
You mean that thing (or is that another law?) that forces me to find that "I really don't care in the slightest" button about cookies on every single page?
You need some perspective - Meta wouldn't even crack the top 100 in terms of evil:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abir_Congo_Company
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuPont#Controversies_and_crime...
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/meta-all...
I'm not saying Meta isn't evil - they're a corporation, and all corporations are evil - but you must live in an incredibly narrow-minded and privileged bubble to believe that Meta is categorically more evil than all other evils in the span of human history combined.
Go take a tour of Dachau and look at the ovens and realize what you're claiming. That that pales in comparison to targeted ads.
Just... no.
If he disagrees with EU values so much, he should just stay out of the EU market. It's a free world, nobody forced him to sell cars in the EU.
in this case, it is clear that the EU policy resulted in cookie banners
European aristocrats just decided that you shall now be subjects again and Europeans said ok. It’s kind of astonishing how easy it was, and most Europeans I met almost violently reject that notion in spite of the fact that it’s exactly what happened as they still haven’t even really gotten an understanding for just how much Brussels is stuffing them.
In a legitimate system it would need to be up to each sovereign state to decide something like that, but in contrast to the US, there is absolutely nothing that limits the illegitimate power grab of the EU.
I am happy to inform you that the EU actually works according to treaties which basically cover every point of a constitution and has a full set of courts of law ensuring the parliament and the European executive respect said treaties and allowing European citizens to defend their interests in case of overreach.
> European aristocrats just decided
I am happy to inform you that the European Union has a democratically elected parliament voting its laws and that the head of commission is appointed by democratically elected heads of states and commissioners are confirmed by said parliament.
If you still need help with any other basic fact about the European Union don’t hesitate to ask.
So then it's something completely worthless in the globally competitive cutthroat business world, that even the companies who signed won't follow, they just signed it for virtue signaling.
If you want companies to actually follow a rule, you make it a law and you send their CEOs to jail when they break it.
"Voluntary codes of conduct" have less value in the business world than toilet paper. Zuck was just tired of this performative bullshit and said the quiet part out loud.
This cynical take seems wise and world-weary but it is just plain ignorant, please read the link.
How could you possibly infer what I said as a defense of Meta rather than an indictment of OpenAI?
Fascinating.
Ask Meta to sign something about voluntarily restricting ad data or something and you'll get your same result there.
Why does anybody believe ANYthing OpenAI states?!
And that's the sort of stuff that's not classified. There's, with 100% certainty, plenty that is.
Really it does, especially with some technology run by so few which is changing things so fast..
> Meta says it won’t sign Europe AI agreement, calling it an overreach that will stunt growth
God forbid critical things and impactful tech like this be created with a measured head, instead of this nonsense mantra of "Move fast and break things"
Id really prefer NOT to break at least what semblance of society social media hasn't already broken.
What do surprise me is anything at all working with the existing rulesets, Effectively no one have technical competence and the main purpose of legislation seems to add mostly meaningless but parentally formulated complexities in order to justify hiring more bureaucrats.
>How to live in Europe >1. Have a job that does not need state approval or licensing. >2. Ignore all laws, they are too verbose and too technically complex to enforce properly anyway.
And consumers will bear the brunt.
Besides, I posted from my laptop.