SCIENCE

European AI law: can it set a global standard for regulators?

Published

16 hours ago

May 10, 2023

The breathtaking development of artificial intelligence has stunned users with composing music, creating images and writing essays, and raised concerns about its implications. Even European Union officials working on groundbreaking rules for managing emerging technologies have been caught off guard by the rapid growth of AI.

A block of 27 countries proposed the first AI rules in the Western world two years ago, focusing on curbing risky but narrow applications. Virtually no mention was made of general purpose artificial intelligence systems such as chatbots. Legislators working on the AI Act thought about whether to include them, but did not know how to do it, and even if it was necessary.

“Then came the ChatGPT boom,” said Dragos Tudorache, a Romanian member of the European Parliament, one of the leaders of the event. “If anyone else had doubts about whether we needed anything at all, I think the doubts dissipated quickly.”

The release of ChatGPT last year attracted worldwide attention due to its ability to generate human responses based on what it has learned from scanning vast amounts of online material. In response to emerging concerns, European lawmakers have been quick to add language in recent weeks regarding generic AI systems, putting the finishing touches on the legislation.

The EU AI law could become the de facto global standard for AI, and companies and organizations could decide that the size of a single block market would make compliance easier than developing different products for different regions.

“Europe is the first regional bloc to seriously attempt to regulate AI, which is a huge challenge given the wide range of systems that the broad term ‘AI’ can cover,” said Sarah Chander, Senior Policy Advisor at EDRi’s Digital Rights Group.

Authorities around the world are scrambling to figure out how to control rapidly advancing technologies to ensure they improve people’s lives without threatening their rights or safety. Regulators are concerned about the new ethical and social risks associated with ChatGPT and other general purpose artificial intelligence systems that could change everyday life, from work and education to copyright and privacy.

The White House recently invited the heads of AI tech companies, including Microsoft, Google and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, to discuss the risks, while the Federal Trade Commission warned it would not hesitate to crack down.

China has released a draft regulation requiring security assessments of any products that use generative artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT. The UK competition watchdog has launched an AI market review, and Italy briefly blocked ChatGPT over a privacy breach.

Wide-ranging EU rules covering any provider of AI services or products are expected to be approved by a committee of the European Parliament on Thursday, after which negotiations will begin between the 27 member states, the EU parliament and the executive commission.

European rules affecting the rest of the world – the so-called Brussels effect – have previously played out after the EU tightened data privacy and mandated the use of cables to charge phones, though such efforts have been criticized for stifling innovation.

This time the attitude may be different. Tech leaders including Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have called for a six-month break to consider the risks.

Jeffrey Hinton, a computer scientist known as the “Godfather of AI,” and fellow AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio expressed their concerns last week about the uncontrolled development of AI.

Mr Tudorache said such warnings show that the EU’s decision to start developing AI rules in 2021 was “the right decision.”

Google, which has responded to ChatGPT with its own Bard chatbot and is implementing artificial intelligence tools, declined to comment. The company told the EU that “AI is too important not to be regulated.”

Microsoft, which maintains OpenAI, did not respond to a request for comment. He hailed the EU’s efforts as an important step “towards making robust AI the norm in Europe and around the world.”

Mira Murati, Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, said in an interview last month that she believes governments should be involved in regulating AI technologies.

But when asked if some of OpenAI’s tools should be classified as higher risk in the context of the proposed European rules, she said it was “a lot of nuance”.

“It depends on where you’re applying the technology,” she said, citing a “very high-risk medical or legal use case” compared to an accounting or advertising application as an example.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman plans to tour the world this month in Brussels and other European cities to talk about the technology with users and developers.

According to a recent partial bill obtained by the Associated Press, newly added provisions in the EU AI Act would require “underlying” AI models to disclose copyrighted material used to train systems.

Core models, also known as large language models, are a subcategory of general purpose AI that includes systems such as ChatGPT. Their algorithms are trained on vast pools of online information such as blog posts, digital books, scientific articles, and popular songs.

“You have to make a significant effort to document the copyrighted material that you use in training the algorithm,” Mr. Tudorache said.

Policy makers for AI must balance the risks the technology poses against the transformative benefits it promises.

According to EDRi’s Ms Chander, big tech companies developing AI systems and European national ministries looking to deploy them are “seeking to limit the power of regulators,” while civil society groups are pushing for greater accountability.

“We need more information about how these systems are developed — about the level of environmental and economic resources invested in them — and how and where these systems are used so that we can effectively challenge them,” she said.

In line with the EU’s risk-based approach, the use of AI threatens people’s safety or rights and is subject to strict controls.

Remote facial recognition is expected to be banned. So are government “social evaluation” systems that rate people based on their behavior. The indiscriminate “retrieval” of photographs from the Internet used for biometric matching and facial recognition is also prohibited.

In addition to therapeutic or medical purposes, technologies for predictive control and emotion recognition are also missing.

Violations can result in fines of up to 6% of a company’s global annual revenue.

Even after receiving final approval, which is expected no later than the end of the year or early 2024, the AI Law will not go into effect immediately. Companies and organizations will have a grace period to figure out how to adopt the new rules.

It’s possible the industry will push for more time, arguing that the final version of the AI Act goes further than the original proposal, said Frederico Oliveira da Silva, senior lawyer at European consumer group BEUC.

They may object that “instead of one and a half to two years, we need two to three years,” he said.

He noted that ChatGPT was launched only six months ago, and during this time it has already brought a lot of problems and benefits.

If the AI Act does not go into effect for many years, “what will happen in those four years?” Mr. Da Silva said. “That’s really our concern and that’s why we’re asking the authorities to be aware of this, just to really focus on this technology.”

The story was reported by the Associated Press. AP Technology contributor Matt O’Brien in Providence, RI.

Related Topics:European Global law Regulators set standard

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SCIENCE

A possible meteorite hit a house in New Jersey, no one was hurt

Published

9 hours ago

May 11, 2023

Jan Topete

HOPEWELL TOWNSHIP, NJ (AP) – Metal object, presumably meteorites blew a hole in the roof of a downtown New Jersey home this week, crashing into the wood floor and bouncing around the bedroom. The family that owns the house found a black stone the size of a potato in the corner, still warm.

No one was hurt and no major damage was done to the home, police said in the town of Hopewell, north of the state capital Trenton. The object measures about 4 by 6 inches (10 by 15 centimeters) and weighs about four pounds (1.8 kilograms), police said.

Susie Cope, whose family owns the home, said they initially thought someone had thrown a rock into the upstairs bedroom on Monday, but soon realized that wasn’t the case. The family plans to meet with an astrophysicist who will study the object further.

“We think it’s a meteorite, it went through here, hit the floor here because it’s completely damaged, it ricocheted up to this part of the ceiling, and then finally came to rest on the floor there,” Cope said. KYW TV in Philadelphia. “I touched this thing because she thought it was a random stone, I don’t know, and it was warm.”

Cope said chemical protection officials came to their home to test it, along with her family, in case they were exposed to any radioactive material, but all of those tests were negative.

SCIENCE

Fossils of giant pliosaurs discovered in England

Published

10 hours ago

May 11, 2023

Jan Topete

Paleontologists have discovered four Jurassic pliosaurid neck vertebrae in the Kimmeridge Clay Formation near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, England.

The post “Giant Pliosaurus Fossils Discovered in England” first appeared on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

SCIENCE

News Brief: US counts old growth forests, Canadian scientists march for higher wages, and condor dung reveals ancient history of birds | The science

Published

11 hours ago

May 11, 2023

Jan Topete

FOREST ECOLOGY

US increased the number of old forests

Last year, President Joe Biden surprised forest scientists by ordering an Earth Day inventory of state holdings of mature and old-growth forests. This sparked a fight from the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to create a formal definition of what constitutes “mature” and “old growth” forests and apply those definitions to millions of hectares. Meeting the April 22 deadline last month, the agencies released their findings in a report noting that of the nearly 72 million hectares of forest they manage, 45% are mature and 18% are old-growth. Figures that exceed estimates published by non-federal researchers include 9 million hectares of pine-juniper forest (pictured here in Utah), a type of forest rarely previously classified as old-growth. The report’s findings are likely to spark a heated debate on how to manage old forests and make them resilient to climate change.

SCIENTIFIC SECURITY

The chemist received house arrest

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MARINE BIOLOGY

unknown underwater

Scientists suspect they have described less than 10% of the marine species on Earth. To learn more about the ocean’s remaining inhabitants, researchers, businesses and philanthropists have teamed up to identify some 100,000 new sea creatures from an estimated 2 million as yet unidentified species over the next decade. V ocean census, launched last week, will combine DNA sequencing with machine learning to create a kind of cyber-taxonomy, classifying organisms collected on expeditions across the world’s seas. The results could help conservation and give scientists a better understanding of the role marine life plays in oxygen and food production, and in the carbon cycle. With financial support from the Nippon Foundation, Japan’s largest philanthropic organization, the British Institute of Marine Science and Conservation, called Nekton, will coordinate the collection of ships, divers, submarines and deep-sea robots. Ocean Census will make its data, along with 3D digital images of all new species, available to both researchers and the public. With the disappearance of corals, sharks and other marine species in recent decades, “we are in a race against time,” says project leader Alex Rogers, a marine biologist at the University of Oxford.

PALEONTOLOGY

Welsh fossils highlight early life

This 462-million-year-old fossil represents a new species, a clam-like creature with long appendages.JOE BOTTING

In Wales, paleontologists have discovered a rich source of 462-million-year-old fossils that show a greater match than expected between animals that evolved in the Cambrian explosion 40 million years ago and the ancestors of modern species. The researchers thought these ancestors had replaced the Cambrian creatures, but the new site – a small quarry in a sheep field – shows a much more gradual transition, say Jo Botting and Lucy Muir of the Amgedfa Simru National Museum in Wales. Among the many fossils, the couple cataloged 170 marine species, including glass sponges, crustaceans called horseshoe shrimp, and six-legged arthropods that may have given rise to insects. Nearly all of the animals are tiny, many ranging from the size of a sesame seed to a pencil eraser, and their soft bodies are perfectly preserved, giving insight into what they ate and how they lived, the research team reports this week in Ecology of nature and evolution. The quarry, according to Julien Kimmig, a paleontologist at the Karlsruhe State Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the work, “could certainly be as famous” as the famous Burgess Shale in Canada, a rich source of Cambrian fossils from 500 million years ago.

EDUCATION

Indian classes got rid of Darwin

Scientists in India are protesting the decision to exclude discussion of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from the textbooks used by millions of ninth and tenth graders. More than 4,000 people have signed a petition from the Society for Breakthrough Sciences to recover the material. The non-profit advocacy group for science reports that the National Council for Educational Research and Training, an autonomous government group that sets curricula for India’s 256 million primary and secondary school students, has dropped the theme as part of a “content rationalization” process. The removal “distorts the idea of a comprehensive secondary education,” says evolutionary biologist Amitabh Joshi of the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Science. Others fear it indicates a growing interest in pseudoscience among Indian officials and see it as unlikely that NCERT will back down.

SCIENCE POLICY

EU trial defense fund blown up

The European Union was ill-prepared to increase funding for defense research, report published last week own financial supervisory authority. Between 2017 and 2019, the EU spent around €90m on 18 projects under the Defense Research Preparatory Action, a fund designed to “pave the way” for the much larger €8bn European Defense Fund, which began operations in 2021 and will last until 2027. But the European Audit Chamber report says the previous pilot fund did not fully function as a “test bed” for the larger program as projects were shelved and made “limited progress”. The auditors also warned that the European Commission is too understaffed to cope with rising spending on defense research.

ECOLOGY

Condor feces reveal their history

Andean condor in flight — Andean condor nests hold a messy archive of their diet going back thousands of years.JACK DIKING/NPL/MINDEN PICTURES

To find out how the Andean condor’s diet has changed over millennia of environmental change, researchers climbed a cliff in Argentina’s Patagonia region to collect samples of bird droppings from a donut-shaped mound. Based on radiocarbon dating and other clues, scientists have found that condors have nested on this slope for about 2,200 years. However, guano has shown that between about 300 and 1300 AD. Andean condors became scarce as ash from nearby volcanic eruptions covered the landscape and killed the animals whose carcasses they hunted. The scientists also learned that the careers of condors have changed over the years. Traces of llama DNA predominate in older layers of guano deposits, while introduced sheep and cattle are more visible in more recent layers. The researchers say the findings illustrate the value of studying long-term nesting sites for reconstructing a species’ ecological history.

SCIENCE COMMUNITY

Demand for Canadian PhDs on the rise

Thousands of scientists across Canada left work May 1 to protest against the low wages of graduate and doctoral students. Sarah Laframboise, Doctor of Biochemistry, University of Ottawa, at an event on Canada’s Parliament Hill. A student and executive director of the grassroots organization Support Our Science cited a study that found 86% of graduate students were stressed and worried about their finances. The organization behind the one-day protest is asking the federal government to increase pay for graduate and postdoc students, who are funded by federal scholarships and fellowships. In August 2022, he sent an open letter to the government asking for more investment in the next generation of scientists. But there were no such changes in this year’s federal budget, released in March.