S6.3 - Regulate and Build: The EU's past, present and future in and with AI

Thanks, Frederick, for the outline.

It sounds like fascinating and very important work, tackling a range of challenges and seeking to build technologies that support European values, we could say, in some ways.

I guess what I'd like to ask you now, Frederick, is, you know, Sue-Anne outlined for us the EU's AI Act.

You're doing your work in a European context.

What's your view on the EU's AI Act? Specifically, you know, are there features of the Act that you really like? And equally, are there features of the Act that you find frustrating?

So first of all, I do think it is very important to have this regulation.

I think it's very good that Europe has taken a clear stance in the sense that we say that, yes, we do want AI, but we don't want any AI.

We actually have requirements and expectations on this technology.

So I think that's the most important part of this in my mind.

Then the challenge really becomes that from a practitioner's point of view, it leads to so much legal uncertainty.

And when the act was created, one of the arguments for it was that it was intended to reduce the legal uncertainty and provide a level playing field so that everyone knows the rules.

However, this is not the case in practice, and it will, as far as I understand, not be the case until it's actually been, I mean, ruled in courts.

And that will take, I don't know, five, 10 years, which means that we will now have a very long period of a large uncertainty where it's very difficult to get any clear answers.

So I think this is one of the challenges.

We can take a concrete example.

So one of the things we discussed in terms of this language model training was you can take the Swedish king.

The Swedish king is a public figure, which means that then we are allowed to include information about the Swedish king.

But the Swedish king is also a private citizen.

And according to the GDPR and so on, if you're a private citizen, you have the right to not be.

Then we basically need to ask permission to include information about this person.

And now the question becomes, are you allowed to include information about the Swedish king or not? That's an open question.

We also had this question of, I mean, maybe it's not much about the AI Act.

It's more about, actually, I think one challenge is also the interplay between the AI Act and other regulation.

For example, GDPR has this data minimization requirement that you basically should collect as little data as possible.

While the AI Act says that you should have complete and accurate training data, which means that you should have as much information as possible.