World’s first major law stops companies taking your private info to train AI – and it comes into effect today

A LAW placing restrictions on all-powerful AI pioneers goes into effect today - a historic first.

European Union member states, lawmakers, and the European Commission gave the AI Act their final stamp of approval Thursday.

The landmark statute will govern how companies develop and apply artificial intelligence technology.

The Act also has big implications for American tech giants like Meta and Microsoft who maintain a stronghold on the industry.

Among its lofty goals, the law seeks to curtail machine learning bias, which occurs when the output of an AI system reflects human biases contained in the original training data.

This phenomenon has been observed before. Amazon, for instance, discovered a hiring algorithm was favoring applications based on words more commonly found in men's resumes.

Any systems deemed "high-risk" will be subject to thorough inspection.

These include loan decisioning systems, educational scoring, and biometric identification systems.

While generative AI will not be classified as high-risk, it must comply with transparency requirements and EU copyright law.

The European Parliament notes models that "might pose systemic risk," like the more advanced GPT-4, will face heightened scrutiny.

Tech giants have already hit a stumbling block in the EU thanks to the General Data Protection Regulation, which limits their use of private information.

The GPDR builds a case for EU-based Instagram and Facebook users to be able to opt out of Meta's data collection practices.

The tech giant faced backlash earlier this year when users learned it was scraping information from public social media profiles to train AI.

While the passage of the AI Act is yet another victory for EU residents, such protections don't yet extend to users in other countries.

The United States is woefully behind the EU when it comes to data privacy protections.

This means companies like Meta can feed U.S. users' data into AI models without repercussions.

This lack of regulations has also led to an explosion in AI-generated deepfakes, or digitally manipulated content that depicts an individual doing or saying something they didn't do.

Earlier this week, Elon Musk posted a deepfake video of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to X, formerly Twitter.

As they become increasingly widespread, government officials are starting to take notice.

The Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (Defiance) Act unanimously cleared the Senate on July 25.

The Act specifically focuses on sexually explicit deepfakes, opening the door for victims of non-consensual imagery to sue creators and distributors.

People who possess and intend to distribute the content, and those who receive it while knowing or recklessly disregarding the victim's lack of consent, are also subject to the law.

The Defiance Act now heads to the House for a vote.

What are the arguments against AI?

Artificial intelligence is a highly contested issue, and it seems everyone has a stance on it. Here are some common arguments against it:

Loss of jobs - Some industry experts argue that AI will create new niches in the job market, and as some roles are eliminated, others will appear. However, many artists and writers insist the argument is ethical, as generative AI tools are being trained on their work and wouldn't function otherwise.

Ethics - When AI is trained on a dataset, much of the content is taken from the Internet. This is almost always, if not exclusively, done without notifying the people whose work is being taken.

Privacy - Content from personal social media accounts may be fed to language models to train them. Concerns have cropped up as Meta unveils its AI assistants across platforms like Facebook and Instagram. There have been legal challenges to this: in 2016, legislation was created to protect personal data in the EU, and similar laws are in the works in the United States.

Misinformation - As AI tools pulls information from the Internet, they may take things out of context or suffer hallucinations that produce nonsensical answers. Tools like Copilot on Bing and Google's generative AI in search are always at risk of getting things wrong. Some critics argue this could have lethal effects - such as AI prescribing the wrong health information.

“Current laws don’t apply to deepfakes, leaving women and girls who suffer from this image-based sexual abuse without a legal remedy,” Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin posted to X after it passed.

“It’s time to give victims their day in court and the tools they need to fight back.”