Re: Draft EU AI Act regulations could have a chilling effect • The Register

Hello,

I am sorry but did anyone consult a lawyer (EU-based, of course) first? From the first look, Brookings Institution is just a think tank, non-European on top of that. The author of the critique (https://www.brookings.edu/experts/alex-engler/) is not a lawyer but “graduated from American University with a B.A. in economics before earning a Master of Public Policy at Georgetown University and a Master of Science in Predictive Analytics at Northwestern University”.

The author mentions “the explicit inclusion of open-source GPAI undermines the Council’s ambitions”. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A52021PC0206 doesn’t contain anything that would remotely hint at that if you search by the keywords “open”, “free”, “publicly”.

The author argues that the Regulation will create “legal liabilities, and thus a chilling effect, on open-source GPAI development”. Now, if he is a non-lawyer, let me give my non-lawyer opinion as well. The proposal is clearly aimed at the application, not the development or release of AI systems: “Title I defines the subject matter of the regulation and the scope of application of the new rules that cover the placing on the market, putting into service and use of AI systems.”. I see it as an excellent proposal, that will preclude businesses from saying the devil AI algorithm made me do it.

There is similar regulation like IEC 61508, but nobody claims that such regulation may pose risks to the GCC developers if there is a bug in the compiler and a safety-critical system fails and the vendor may sue the GCC developers. First, there is a disclaimer of liability in the OSS licenses. Second, because the proposed Regulation requires high-risk systems to go through “ex-ante conformity assessment”.

The proposal also includes great nuggets like “The proposal also prohibits AI-based social scoring for general purposes done by public authorities. Finally, the use of ‘real time’ remote biometric identification systems in publicly accessible spaces for the purpose of law enforcement is also prohibited unless certain limited exceptions apply.”

In conclusion, I would like again that I am not a lawyer, and my analysis was very cursory. However, I would like the community to consult an EU-based lawyer and understand the implications of the proposal first before spreading calls for specific action.

Best regards,
Andrii Berezovskyi

From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
Date: Tuesday, 13 September 2022 at 10:12
To: "paoladimaio10@googlemail.com" <paoladimaio10@googlemail.com>
Cc: ProjectParadigm-ICT-Program <metadataportals@yahoo.com>, Public-cogai <public-cogai@w3.org>, W3C AIKR CG <public-aikr@w3.org>, public-lod <public-lod@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Draft EU AI Act regulations could have a chilling effect • The Register
Resent-From: <public-lod@w3.org>
Resent-Date: Tuesday, 13 September 2022 at 10:09

Is there any response from actual Open Source AI projects? Or collaborative data initiatives like Wikidata?

Speaking of large tech companies - including my employer, Google - many have focussed very heavily on Open Source, and have significant investment in the Open Source ecosystem being healthy.

Dan

On Tue, 13 Sep 2022 at 01:13, Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio@gmail.com<mailto:paola.dimaio@gmail.com>> wrote:
Do we have a plan?

On Tue, Sep 13, 2022 at 12:13 AM ProjectParadigm-ICT-Program <metadataportals@yahoo.com<mailto:metadataportals@yahoo.com>> wrote:
The EU AI Act could spell disaster for open source development and put the AI development in the hands of large companies in the corporate sector. This could also create problems for any technologies using ontologies, semantic web technologies, knowledge graphs, predictive algorithms, knowledge representation, the use of which could be construed as artificial intelligence.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/11/in_brief_ai/


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