Regulations tend to be sensible in a lot of areas, maybe you should ask yourself why someone would not want to respect them - could it possibly be that they're up to no good? And what could that be?

To be fair, in most cases it's just a matter of costs and time. Following regulations can be cumbersome, especially if it's for a foreign market where you have little to no personal experience. So you need to outsource to a team who has the experience and knowledge. And with a fast moving target, like AI, this is not really an option until the project is stable enough.

Even ignoring the fact that the AI Act has not been formally approved yet (although it looks done), the forbidden activities are listed as:

    biometric categorisation systems that use sensitive characteristics (e.g. political, religious, philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation, race);
    untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases;
    emotion recognition in the workplace and educational institutions;
    social scoring based on social behaviour or personal characteristics;
    AI systems that manipulate human behaviour to circumvent their free will;
    AI used to exploit the vulnerabilities of people (due to their age, disability, social or economic situation).

Is any of this so hard NOT to do...?

To me it just looks like Google is being petty here.

> Is any of this so hard NOT to do...?

Easy not to do. Difficult to probably verify with legal and compliance. In a fast-moving field, it’s reasonable to avoid the compliance tax while you and the ecosystem are aligning. Once it’s ready, a finished product can be shipped to high-cost jurisdictions.

Google ships crap to Europe every other day, I find it hard to believe that they don't have quick processes for basic compliance.

Most likely they are worried about copyright and GDPR issues, not those concerning AI specifically (yet).

Copyright is copyright everywhere, it's actually a much more annoying topic in lawsuit-friendly US.

GDPR - by now everyone knows what to (not) do to avoid problems with that: just let people be in control of their data. If you can't guarantee that, it means you're doing shady shit that you probably shouldn't be doing.

Yeah, exactly. Even if you're doing perfectly fine things, compliance costs. If the revenue from Europe isn't worth it (or isn't worth it yet), well, Europe doesn't get access to whatever it is you're doing.

Is it possibly be that delays are a consequence of having to do extra work rather than being up to no good?

A fair argument if Google has a couple of interns working part time on it.

This is a ridiculous argument. The intent of most regulations might be sensible, but claiming that the implementations are (which is the only logical way to read your comment given that that's the point that the GP is making) is subjective and highly unlikely to be true for most objective measurements.

Is this one of those instances where people vote against their interests because they identify with the enemy? I don't know of another reason why someone wouldn't want regulation that forces companies to respect their privacy.

The bulk of the people affected by the exclusion - English only - has nothing to do with regulation…

Which regulations would you like to see repealed?

Yes we should give Google free reign so we can use their shitty "me too" models.