- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
It’s clear that companies are currently unable to make chatbots like ChatGPT comply with EU law, when processing data about individuals. If a system cannot produce accurate and transparent results, it cannot be used to generate data about individuals. The technology has to follow the legal requirements, not the other way around.
Given the possibility that this is a general problem of AI that simply cannot be corrected, the law could end up meaning that LLMs are outright forbidden in the EU. If that’s true then the legal requirements will have to be changed, there’s no way the EU would actually ban them. It’d be like opting out of the internal combustion engine due to some detail of an old law that they happened to violate.
they would not be banned outright. They just can’t be used to process data about customers.
But an ai furry porn generator doesn’t necessarily process customer data
Not unless you want furry porn about your… taxes?
That would get it banned in the US, not the eu.
The economic effects would still be enormous. You can amend my analogy to “banning internal combustion engines when their services are being sold to customers”, leaving them free for individuals to use to carry themselves around, and it’d still have a massive impact.
Europe’s not going to kneecap themselves over this.
If the world had opted out of the ICE early, maybe we wouldn’t be in quite the global warming situation we’re in.
LLMs are still a novelty product that can barely perform their novelty. Comparing them to the wildly useful and game changing ICE is not terribly accurate.
It’s not the world that would be opting out of the internal combustion engine in this analogy, it would be Europe. There rest of the world would go on industrializing while Europe remains in the 19th century. It would be an insane act of self-destruction.
Or European websites will suddenly be the only ones worth visiting because they aren’t buried under mountains of LLM garbage text.
This is something that really needs to be taught better, at least in the US.
GDPR doesn’t mean that LLMs are forbidden in the EU, but it does mean that the companies that create them may be liable for damages. That said, the damages must be real. Actual damages is somewhat cut and dry (e.g., ChatGPT publishes defamatory information about you, and someone relies on it to your detriment), but GDPR also contemplates damages for distress (e.g., emotional).
I think this position needs to be rejected in the strongest possible terms. Our response to any emerging technology should not be “It’s too good not to have, so who cares if people lose their rights?” The right to privacy and with it the right to control one’s likeness, name, and personal data is a much easier right to conceptually trade away than, say, the right to bodily integrity, but I think we’ve seen enough dystopian sci-fi at this point to understand where the intersections might lie between other rights and correspondingly miraculous technologies. [And after all, without the combustion engine we probably wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of climate change right now.]
Should we, for instance, do away with the right to bodily integrity if it means everyone gets chipped shortly after birth? [The analogy to circumcision is unintentional but not lost on me.] After all, the chips mean that we can locate missing and abducted children easily and at trivial cost. They also mean that we no longer need to carry money or proxies for money. Crime is at an all-time low. Worth it, right? After all, the procedure is “minimally invasive.”
The point is, rights have to be sacrosanct. They need to be the first consideration, and they need to be non-negotiable. If a technology needs those rights to bend or give way in order to exist, then it should not exist. If it’s of sufficient benefit to society, then it can be made to exist in a way that preserves those rights, and those who are unwilling to create it in such a way should suffer the sanction of law.
Or on the other hand, maybe we have to admit that these technologies were released before they were finished, and that was a dangerous decision. It’s now been well documented that chat gpt and similar technologies were rushed to the public against the advice of some of their developers.
The developers will need to devise ways for the LLMs to understand their own training data.
Llm tech is not rushed. The models are not for accurate information and trying to use them this way is out of their scope. What’s rushed is corpos trying to use them for searches