Member-only story
Undisclosed AI Content Is Becoming Illegal
In a bold but necessary move, the EU is showing AI the middle finger…
Those who thought that AI will be the next ticket to early retirement due to lack of legal oversight are having a rude awakening. The EU thinks not, and on this occasion, I agree. As much as the US wanted to show the world how AI regulation is supposed to be done, the EU took the lead and came up with a very comprehensive regulatory framework — the EU AI Act — that has been in the works, believe it or not, for over a year, 18 months to be more exact, and its final form to be signed into law by the end of 2023, and not a day too soon, if you ask me.
Some sobering details
Those who read my very popular analysis on OpenAI’s Testimony Before the Senate, will find this latest development in AI regulation particularly interesting. A lot of what has been discussed in that testimony, the EU is already looking to implement. It looks like across the pond from the US, regulators and lawmakers in Europe — despite the raging war in Ukraine and the energy crisis — still managed to find the time to sit down and come up with a cohesive, implementable approach to regulating AI.
To many hard-core AI fans this will feel like a governmental middle finger, a political overreach, suits messing with tech, but the EU AI Act is far more than that. It’s a necessary, detailed, actionable plan.
Fans of ChatGPT, DALL-E, Bard and all the other AI mushrooms out there will find that all content created with these tools will require appropriate labelling as AI generated. Currently, that isn’t the case, and unfortunately the repercussions are already widely visible. For instance, I have never in my life read so many poorly written software engineering and technology articles as I have in the past three months. Literally copy-pasted text and images out of Bard and ChatGPT while pretending it’s original content, is already widespread. The same goes for using personal data and copyrighted content for training purposes. All of this, under the EU AI Act, becomes illegal and rightly so.
