Most headlines about the EU are inaccurate attacks. See bendy bananas etc.

EU regulation 2257/94 covers the abnormal curvature of bananas. There is no myth here, the EU does indeed regulate the straightness of bananas and has done for a long time.

As for this law, it is going to be heavily criticised and this rather polite post from Gellman is just the beginning. Even the quoted part in the top voted comment is absurd. What exactly are these "subliminal techniques" that need regulating? How do they work? There are no AI papers I recall that discuss how to build a mind controlling AI, let alone one that's designed to cause people psychological harm. Does the EU really believe in this stuff? I thought government belief in subliminal messaging and mind control disappeared with the CIA's LSD experiments decades ago.

It does not regulate any shape of banana though. It standardises what was being used as a classification system. A banana that is S shaped is not banned, but you can't call it Extra.

Regulation does not mean the same thing as banning.

Wikipedia has a pretty good article on the banana issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_Regulation_(EC)_No....

> There are no AI papers I recall that discuss how to build a mind controlling AI, let alone one that's designed to cause people psychological harm.

https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full

"Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks"

"Core Data Science Team, Facebook, Inc., Menlo Park, CA 94025; and Departments of Communication and Information Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853"

That's probably the closest but it's not AI related. They just tweaked how often certain posts appeared based on the smileys attached to it, which doesn't involve AI or even statistics really.

Also, even if you consider the experiment unethical, it boosted as many people's exposure to positive emotions as to negative, so it's hard to claim that this is an attempt to create psychological harm. Any law that outlawed this would presumably outlaw all of psychology. And finally, it's a psych study. Is it right? Would it replicate? Who knows, by design it's not replicable. It would be bad policymaking to impose draconian laws on an entire continent based on a single questionable psych study that doesn't even have much to do with AI in the first place.

Under this proposed regulation, it doesn't have to be AI. "machine learning, logic/knowledge, statistics", as long as the goal is on the list of bad stuff in the regulation.

>subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness in order to materially distort a person’s behaviour

Doesn’t this generally describe all contemporary forms of advertisement? Or, for any given advertisement, how would you demonstrate it is out of scope of this qualifier?

> in a manner that causes or is likely to cause that person or another person physical or psychological harm

Physical is pretty obvious but psychological harm seems slippery.

Not saying I’m against the idea, but this language seems like it needs a little work.

My two cents are that it seems like a pretty good start.

It'd probably be possible for well-funded organizations to use automated data collection and clandestine communication methods to collect detailed profile information about people and then disseminate it in a way that attempts to make people fall in line with some particular ideology; or simply to harass people (wasting their time, which eventually amounts to a form of attack).

Unlikely though that might seem, if such things are becoming technically feasible, then it seems worthwhile to put safety regulations in place to prevent them from taking too much hold.

Enough automation of such systems could make it very difficult for individuals -- perhaps entire groups -- to backtrack out of whatever mindset the systems are leading them towards. Let's try to avoid those kind of outcomes.

> Doesn’t this generally describe all contemporary forms of advertisement? Or, for any given advertisement, how would you demonstrate it is out of scope of this qualifier?

I guess if one is told (clearly) that "this is an ad" then it's probably fine?

It probably does and it probably includes all political advertising as well, thereby rendering any ads run by the entities promoting this effort possibly illegal.

The wording is far, far too broad in scope and is guaranteed to cause major headaches for everyone as it spends decades in the courts being refined to the point of reaching some degree of clarity.

There's some interesting impetus here, but this one needs a lot of work - it might be worthwhile to focus in more on specific areas, such as ads themselves, or registration data collection wherein clarity might be more easy to achieve.

Advertisement doesn't cause psychological harm in this context, otherwise you would get sued for abuse over phone advertisement.

What’s the standard for harm? I think that’s the part that isn’t clear to me. What if an advertisement diminishes my self-esteem to some degree?

If we could quantify the amount of time and distraction caused by advertising, on aggregate, it's possible that opinions would change.

A few companies do already have access to plenty of data that they could use to calculate these kind of reports.

Why are they regulating only AI? They should wide the spectrum of the regulation and include, for example, graph theory, combinatorics, probability theory, etc and any other branch of discrete mathematics or even mathematics and statistics in general. They look like pretty good tools to perpetrate those crimes too. Or, wait, are those “practices” even classified as crimes but current laws? How many people and organizations were fined or incarcerated for those last year? Let’s suppose they are. If someone commits one of those crimes hardcoding a system or simply using some random generator, or simply sending handwritten letters will this regulation apply? I really wonder how many AI-based systems the people proposing this regulation have really built.

The regulation includes things like "specialist systems" so yes, "graph theory, combinatorics, probability theory" on that context counts as "AI" (this is in TFA)

Surprised that causing physical or psychological harm (in any way) wasn't already prohibited.

Isn't this just language to make the law more explicit?

Directly causing harm is always illegal, but you can't outlaw all indirect ways to cause harm since it is unclear if it is the suffers fault or not. In this case this law argues that people shouldn't be expected to learn to cope with these practices and instead tech companies should stop doing these things.

Then can't we extend this to all forms of psychological manipulation? Like coercing people into buying stuff they don't need?

Try defining that, because you can't. If I go into the store and buy something I didn't go in there for, was I manipulated by seeing it on the shelf? Are promo videos on an online game store "psychological manipulation" because they can make you buy a game you didn't need?

A/B testing to the rescue!

    A (control): rate of purchases of the item WITHOUT the ad present.
    B (experiment): rate of purchases of the item WITH the ad present.

If A and B differ significantly then by definition the ad manipulates purchasers. And we all know companies track exactly these metrics, ripe for subpoena.

(Separate question is whether this practice is bad for consumers; I'd argue "not all ads are bad" and "no ads is never bad" so to minimize harm, we should adopt "ads are bad until proven otherwise.")

Yes, that works with ads, but the person I replied to was referencing any form of manipulation. Because what counts as manipulation? I referenced two examples of things that average consumers do, but generally wouldn't say they've been "manipulated" to do so.

And that's before you even get into the question of "what is an ad?" and "are all ads bad?" (which you mention) Because promo videos for things such as video games are common, but I wouldn't call them ads (per se). Are music singles ads for the whole album? Historically, music videos were called "promo videos" because their intent was: "we air this on MTV or the FM radio so that people will buy the album." Am I being advertised to there? Maybe? But what if I end up finding a new band I like?

You can't define this cleanly.

Manipulation requires intent and action:

    "I believe they won't do B unless I do A, so I do A."

"I believe they won't do B unless I do A" on its own is harmless—there's no action.

"I do A" on its own is unintentional. Does anyone really act without intent?

Legal systems have (imperfect) ways to ascertain intent (AKA premeditation), causality, and harm, so they can deal with the concept of manipulation.

This would outlaw advertising that is effective then, since the entire goal of an advertisement is to maximize the difference between A and B. So to do any advertising you'd have to prove it wasn't very effective? Sounds similar to types of proposed gun regulation: "your guns can kill people, just not too many too fast too effectively"

Not that that means it's necessarily a bad approach, just never heard of marketing being limited by its effectiveness. Similar to having to put those gross pictures on cigarette packages now.

Not quite: effective (AKA manipulative) advertisement would be fine if you can show the behavior the advertisement causes isn't detrimental. Advertising a new treatment for some disease is a net positive; advertising cigarettes is not.

I'm really just suggesting we flip the burden of proof from harmed consumers to advertising companies.

Nice approach. To extend on this, I wish we could scientifically determine how much overconsumption is caused by advertising, and hence how much unnecessary damage to the planet.

“All” is probably too broad as it would include changing anyone’s mind ever for any reason, but I hope that particularly vulnerable people and known particularly potent forms of distortive manipulation would be.

Doesn't it make Facebook illegal?

It causes people psychological harm and uses AI.

They would need to stop doing those things to EU citizens, I guess.

By subliminal means?

I guess you could argue that it is abusing some peoples lower intelligence when it suggests relevant groups for them, but that is probably a stretch.

It is worth noting that in 2012, Facebook conducted psychological experiments on its users. So they have that capability. And god knows who else.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...

Emotional state is probably an input to advertising/content engagement.

Algorithms maximizing engagement probably then grow to manipulate emotional state as a proxy variable. Even if they weren't aimed to.

From there, if an optimal emotional state happens to be "An impending sense of doom, terror of the pervasiveness of crime in my country" other "doom scrolling" etc, the algorithm could we'll be providing psychological harm.

(No idea if this actually applies to this doc, as it's language and aims may be technical)

I'm not sure it satisfies the criterion of "intent" (in order to in the quoted text).

The problem with all these EU regulations is that they are overly detailed. If you have to mention "Bayesian estimation" in a document called a "directive", then you are doing something wrong. In an ideal world, a directive is a high-level document that outlines what ought to be done in broad strokes. Then, the national regulations answer some additional questions accounting for the local circumstances, but leave the fine-grained details to be filled in by legal scholars and the judicial system. In a properly setup legal system that actually honors the principle of subsidiarity, the question of whether Bayesian estimation falls under the law or not would be left to a judge who would look at it in the context of a specific case. So while the article gets a lot wrong, the author's intuition that it is wrong to mention "Bayesian estimation" in a supposedly high-level regulation is correct.

The methods that in this proposal would be prohibited to use for certain pretty bad purposes reads like this:

"(a) Machine learning approaches, including supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, using a wide variety of methods including deep learning;

(b) Logic- and knowledge-based approaches, including knowledge representation, inductive (logic) programming, knowledge bases, inference and deductive engines, (symbolic) reasoning and expert systems;

(c) Statistical approaches, Bayesian estimation, search and optimization methods."

I find this (machine learning, logic/knowledge, statistics) to be pretty a pretty good definition of what they're after. The fact that very specific things are also mentioned does not seem like a red flag to me - it's the way laws are written, with examples, to give guidance to courts.

No, it’s the way laws are written in a broken legal system. In a well-designed, principles-based legal system, laws are kept short and concise, with guidance and examples being provided through more suitable channels.

When I first saw this going around before seeing it on here, my first thought that it's still a bad take because how else are you form your inference without data collection? You're not just going to be given your conditional probability; you're almost certainly going to have to go out to collect the data to construct this (and the data collection being the regulatory item covered).

I think that the hot take machines that are twitter/online communities have a certain amount of mindrot where poorly researched topics make headline news concerns me (which tbf is in itself a hot take I suppose).

Was this where you first saw it? Not many Twitter hits for "eu bayesian estimation".

https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1385960305663090689

100%. PPI needs to hire a tech policy director whose knowledge can expand outside of section 230.

So, democrats. Huh.

Your quote stops short of the much vaguer subsection (c):

(c) the placing on the market, putting into service or use of AI systems by public authorities or on their behalf for the evaluation or classification of the trustworthiness of natural persons over a certain period of time based on their social behaviour or known or predicted personal or personality characteristics, with the social score leading to either or both of the following: (i) detrimental or unfavourable treatment of certain natural persons or whole groups thereof in social contexts which are unrelated to the contexts in which the data was originally generated or collected; (ii) detrimental or unfavourable treatment of certain natural persons or whole groups thereof that is unjustified or disproportionate to their social behaviour or its gravity;

Consider, for example, a supermarket chain that uses Bayesian inference to determine which products in which stores are theft-prone and need to be locked up. I think there's a strong argument to be made that violates (c)(ii).

Your example wouldn't fall under, because the decision is not applied to humans, only to the products - i.e. there's no "credit scoring customers" and thus impacting their ability to buy those items, only decision on whether or not to have them in locked boxes.

Not on the level of an individual person, but on the level of groups of people. People in one neighborhood would have shops with locked boxes and people in another neighborhood would have shops with unlocked boxes. And those neighborhoods could very well have different ethnic compositions.

In this case, you can still buy an item when the box is locked, but the same thing could lead to stores in some neighborhoods not carrying commonly stolen items at all.

Yeah, on further research I think you're right. I jumped the gun a little here.

The difference between the Marina Safeway and the Mission Safeway makes it clear this isn't a property of the products alone.

The point is applying it to people, with effects on the people themselves. Take for example shops that would decide whether you can be served based on face-matching AI. And it's property mainly of impoverishment of the area.

Perhaps it's different in the EU but here in SF that is seen as systemic discrimination. But if it is different in the EU, then I won't judge.

Well, it wouldn't fall under this specific proposed law.

I'm not going to guarantee that it wouldn't fall against something else.

I suppose the slippery slope was something I was concerned about but it doesn't matter.

> by public authorities or on their behalf

A supermarket chain is not a public authority. This prevents governments from creating systems to evaluate the trustworthiness of people, not private businesses.

Why can't they just ban tracking? The way it is worded it would have to be proven that the AI exploits a specific group, which can be subjective. Whereas tracking direct goal is to extract as much money as possible and use AI to optimise.

Its Columbia. They usually hate any and every regulation. I wonder what if any is the rational reason for doing so.

A university for the privileged embracing toxic libertarianism? Color me shocked.