EU lawmakers are utter rubbish. Cookie consent spam?? Paper straws and ear sticks?? Non-removable bottle caps?? Invasive KYC laws?? Banning ‘foreign propaganda’ through DNS blacklist?? Propping up failed projects like the ukromaidan regime?? What. The. Hell. They just spam our countries with the worst stupidity they can come up with, all the while infringing upon our rights and wellbeing.
I voted against joining EU 20 years ago. I guess I was right about that, unfortunately…
Once this has been implemented, something worse can be implemented.
I don’t like these slippery slope arguments. You might as well reduce it to any legislation.
Once people are allowed to make laws, bad people can make bad laws.
Which is why we must continue to vote in the right people, not abandon the concept of laws.
In this case, I don’t doubt that copyright infringement and general censorship are on some people’s agenda.
But this current proposal is bad enough itself and should be opposed because of that and not because someone might make other, even worse proposals in the future.
Article 10a, which contains the upload moderation plan, states that these technologies would be expected “to detect, prior to transmission, the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material or of new child sexual abuse material.”
This is what I guessed the other day when a post here didn’t clarify what the censorship meant.
While I’m not a fan of this stupid regulation, it doesn’t sound like being the armageddon that turns e2ee into ashes.
(Given that Signal doesn’t like it, I might be wrong though.)
As long as we trust, say, Signal, it will possibly be able to do the scan without sending a good chunk of the image data that the user is sending. URLs can be hashed before sending it to the scanner.
The remaining piece for privacy is to use open source and to guarantee that the binaries are free of modification from the original. This problem always existed on the Apple ecosystem btw.
But you can’t detect such things without either server side scanning (kills E2EE dead) or client side scanning (will always be limited in what it can detect, and it’s easy to patch out of clients, AND there’s still the risk of govs maliciously pushing detection of banned media)
The whole system is so flawed that it has like 20-25% success rate.
Or how about this system being adopted for anything else? Guns? Abortion? LGBT related issues? Once something gets implemented, it’s there forever and expansion is inevitable. And each subsequent government will use it for their personal agenda.
They say they the images are merely matched to pre-determined images found on the web. You’re talking about a different scenario where AI detects inappropriate contents in an image.
My guess was that this law was going to permit something as simple as pixel matching. Honestly I don’t imagine they can codify in the law something more sophisticated. Companies don’t want false positives either, at the very least due to profits.
Unfourtunately, I couldn’t find a source stating it would be required. AFAIK it’s been assumed that they would use perceptual hashes, since that’s what various companies have been suggesting/presenting. Like Apple’s NeuralHash, which was reverse engineered. It’s also the only somewhat practical solution, since exact matches would be easily be circumvented by changing one pixel or mirroring the image.
Its a slippery slope thing. Sure, technically it doesn’t break e2ee, but it basically forces app developers to integrate a trojan into their app that scans messages before they are encrypted and send. Right now it is “only” for images, but once this is in place and generally accepted, what is stopping lawmakers to extend it to scanning all messages?
I think the parent is distinguishing between messages & the attachments as they are stored differently & often in different places in many systems. But I agree with you in assuming that the goal would ultimately be to then start scanning messages too.
Imagine governments used something like SHA1 that has conflicts & now you have collision potential–you could even fabricate attachments that could cause a collision to get someone throw in jail since all you have to rely on is the file hashes. If you can’t scan the actually content & you are just using hashes, then you also don’t prevent new content that those in power deem ‘bad’ from being flagged either which doesn’t really stop the proliferation of the ‘bad thing’ just specific known ‘bad things’. If I were implementing clients, I would start adding random bits to the metadata so the hashes always change.
The only way this system even works is if there are centralized points the governments/corporations can control. Chalk this up as another point for supporting decentralization & lightweight self-hosting since it would be impossible to have oversight over such a system if anyone can spin up a personal server in their bedroom.
If the "endpoints" are defined as being somewhere outside the end users' control, because for example the client software they have is designed to betray their secrets, then the system is no longer end-to-end encrypted in the way that both cryptographers and normal people would usually understand the concept.
The images that are flagged by such scanning, local or server side, will have to be manually verified to avoid false persecution. Someone will have to look at the private images you’ve sent that might get flagged.
These systems have huge margins of error and are incredibly inaccurate, so there will be a significant task in manually verifying everything. And do you trust some government random employee (or just the departments general IT practices or ability to not be hacked) with not leaking your nudes or personal images? I sure as hell don’t.
And even if this is handled perfectly and all government employees are super super honorable standup citizens that never do anything slightly wrong ever…There are still malicious governments that persecute minorities, I doubt they will handle these backdoors in digital privacy very well.
So if I send a photo of our kids playing naked in a baby pool to my wife through signal, some slimy-ass eurocrat in some IT center will be able to ‘manually verify’ the photo of my naked kids?? Are you mentally sound??
I hate pedos just as much as every other sane parent, perhaps even more so (I’d love to wear “Why, Garry, why?!” t-shirt all day every day). But to hell with this stupid idea that some slimy scumbags will be able to browse my own photos of my own kids. Hell, even any random photo I take, it’s my business and nobody elses! Go catch pedos the proper way instead, work a little, we don’t need Gestapo or Stasi to hover over everything we do or photograph.
They say they the images are merely matched to pre-determined images found on the web. You’re talking about a different scenario where AI detects inappropriate contents in an image.
Article 10a, which contains the upload moderation plan, states that these technologies would be expected “to detect, prior to transmission, the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material or of new child sexual abuse material.”
My bad. But that phrasing is super stupid, honestly. What company would want to promise to detect new child sex abuse material? Impossible to avoid false negatives.
Gotta let the shareholders know value is only paused. More value will be created once we finish abolishing the remaining rights of EU Citizen’s privacy.
Shareholders are always worried about their value. Gotta pause growth. Can’t stop growth. Growth is infinite. The universe is infinite, and so is the capitalism machine.
I like the new UI more in terms of actual visuals, but it unfortunately has come with more ads and more general bullshit. I just use aurora store if I need something from the play store now!
It was reading this comment that made me realize that I hardly ever use the play store over f-droid anymore, because off the top of my head I couldn’t tell you what the UI looks like
Don’t forget millions upon millions of low-information, low-empathy voters and non-voters who let it happen, many who still lazily believe that corporations are our friends, that “what’s good for walmart and Exxon is good for 'Murica”, that they are still the client and not the product, and the far-reaching implications of this.
And even sadder is that users choose to still use those companies.
At the end of the day, we all have a choice. This happens to those that allow it. We try to stay safe from burglars, traffic accidents, illness, etc., but choose to still use these companies. That’s a choice, and there are ways to improve our lives, like removing them from our lives.
Well honestly, that’s too soft. They did not decide. They were pushed by regulators to follow the law. So bowing to pressure is more appropriate in my view.
Lol, if you mean facebooks AI will skew more towards the views of American Facebook users, I’d say that’s a win for Europe. It will make the AI less valuable, creating a gap in the market for a better AI that can reflect European values or american or both.
AI does not need infinite data. They can easily licence that amount of content. They are just trying to do it cheaply with user content.
I gully expect use for AI training to become a standardized part of locencing for media and content going forwards. For a band or singer, or author, it may be they ibky get a small amoint for using their content but it won’t be stolen. There is minimal value in any one part of the content. There is value in the aggregate of lots of data.
Digitized books out of copyright have more archaic language but I expect we will see lots of media out of copyright being used also. Media organization that make movies, TV shows and publish newspapers and magazines also have a trove of content.
It’s a much much bigger issue than this. Would you rather live in a world where other countries have good AI and you do not? Would you like it if only China has powerful AI? I get the copyright issue, but some things are more important than other things. This is an arms race, and everyone slowing down isn’t exactly an option.
You could have a much more complex understanding of what they are. It isn’t nearly as simple as you are imagining. If you genuinely are curious about what you’re overlooking, then here is a link.
It seems like you severely misunderstand what “AI” as we have it nowadays is (it’s not actual AI) and what it is capable (not very much) and most importantly not capable of (most things it is advertised to do). Even if investor magazines and tech CEOs try to make it seem like that, we’re not one step away from creating HAL9000. LLMs are extremely over hyped and in the most areas they have been deployed a straight up dysfunctional scam. The only arms race that is happening right now is about who can waste the most money and violate the most privacy laws with this nonsense while all the necessary data centers and their insane power and water demands accelerate the destruction of our environment even more.
Sure, thanks for your interest. It’s an incomplete picture, but we can think of LLMs as an abstraction of all the meaningful connections within a dataset to a higher dimensional space - one that can be explored. That alone is an insane accomplishment that is changing some of the pillars of data analysis and knowledge work. But that’s just the contribution of the “Attention is All You Need” paper. Many implementations of modern generative AI combine LLM inference in agentic networks, with GANs, and with rules-based processing. Extracting connections is just one part of one part of a modern AI implementation.
The emergent properties of GPT4 are enough to point toward this exponential curve continuing. Theory of mind (and therefore deception) as well as relational spatial awareness (usually illustrated with stacking problems) developed solely from increasing the parameter count describing the neural network. These were unexpected capabilities. As a result, there is an almost literal arms race on the hardware side to see what other emergent properties exist at higher model sizes. With some poetic license, we’re rending function from form so quickly and effectively that it’s seen by some as freeing and others as a sacrilege.
Some of the most interesting work on why these capabilities emerge and how we might gain some insight (and control) from exploring the mechanisms is being done by Anthropic and by users at Hugging Face. They discovered that when specific neurons in Claude’s net are stimulated, everything it responds with will in some way become about the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance. This sort of probing is perhaps a better route to progress than blindly chasing more size (despite its recent success). But only time will tell. Certainly, Google and MS have had a lot of unforced errors fumbling over themselves to stay in what they think is the race.
I’m happy to take the time to alter your perspective, if you are open to new information.
You took some time, but spent it explaining at a fairly technical level, rather than a lamens term approach. I doubt you managed to change many people’s perspective, but you maybe reinforced some.
This is another good use case for gAI. Copy/paste the comment into a GPT and tell it to re-write the content at the desired reading or technical level. Then it’s available for follow-up clarification questions.
The term "AI" has been in use since 1956 to describe a wide variety of computer algorithms and capabilities. Neural nets and large language models fall very firmly under the term's umbrella.
What you're talking about is a specific kind of AI, artificial general intelligence (AGI). Very few people believe that an LLM on its own can become AGI and even fewer believes that current LLMs are AGI, so unfortunately you're jousting with a strawman here.
If you are genuinely open to understanding the path we are on, the new situational awareness paper would be very eye-opening. It is 160 pages, so it’s probably a bit too much to get through, but there are really good videos that explain it. Matthew Berman has a great video about it. I’m not interested in swaying you and not going to debate, I’m 100s of hours deep into this and have been absolutely obsessed with it. Nobody doubted its impact as much as me. Education on the matter will undeniably change your mind tremendously. The information is there if you want a peak at the future.
I think it’s “legally grey” in the sense that governments have largely made no policies one way or the other on the data harvesting. It’s not banned, but it’s not openly encouraged either, and there’s no real legal precedent to point to for this specific matter besides the general data harvesting big tech does.
The area with the largest similarity I feel is music sampling, and as far as I know, the music industry was very quick to ensure that data harvesting for AI had to follow the same copyright laws as sampling.
There are many laws that go entirely against the constitution of a country. You can start by looking at DMCA laws that violate a bunch of rights in MANY countries. Legally gray is falling short, those are illegal, and still get enforced because $$$
It's similar to my own reaction to the people getting angry about Reddit data being used to train AIs. As someone who's been commenting rather prolifically on Reddit for 13 years I'm actually quite pleased by the thought that my views and interests are being incorporated into the foundations of modern AI. The only downside is that all those people I argued with over that period are also getting in there. :)
Good answer, no way AI will possibly ever catch up to such brilliant responses as this. Certainly, there is no reason to want to have our views represented in the next generation of technology.
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