Sam Altman asked for AI rules. The EU answered

tech.hindustantimes.com:

America innovates, Europe regulates. Just as the world is starting to come to grips with OpenAI, whose boss Sam Altman has both leapfrogged the competition and pleaded for global rules, the European Union has responded with the Artificial Intelligence Act, its own bid for AI superpower status by being the first to set minimum standards. It faces a European Parliament vote on Wednesday.

Yet we're a long way from the deceptively simple world of Isaac Asimov's robot stories, which saw sentient machines deliver the benefits of powerful “positronic brains” with just three rules in place — don't harm humans, obey humans, and defend your existence. AI is clearly too important to not regulate thoroughly, but the EU will have its work cut out to reduce the Act's complexity while promoting innovation.

The AI Act has some good ideas focusing on transparency and trust: Chatbots will have to declare whether they're trained on copyrighted material, deepfakes will have to be labeled as such, and a raft of newly added obligations for the kind of models used in generative AI will require serious efforts to catalog datasets and take responsibility for how they're used.

Lifting the lid on opaque machines that process huge swathes of human output is the right idea, and gets us closer to more dignity around treatment of data. As Dragos Tudorache, co-rapporteur of the law, told me recently, the purpose is to promote “trust and confidence” in a technology that has attracted huge amounts of investment and excitement yet also produced some very dark failures. Self-regulation isn't an option — neither is “running into the woods” and doing nothing out of fear that AI could wipe out humanity one day, he says.

The Act also carries a lot of complexity,