back to article Truth and consequences for enterprise AI as EU know who goes legal: GDPR of everything from chatbots to machine learning

One of the Brexit bonuses we’ve been enjoying since January 1st is that we have abandoned our influence within the world’s regulatory superpower. America and China may have industrial and military dominance, but by placing a decent proportion of global economic activity under the world’s strongest regulatory regime, the EU …

  1. don't you hate it when you lose your account

    A Weeping and gnashing of teeth

    Can be heard around the world. About bloody time

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Devil

      Re: A Weeping and gnashing of teeth

      XKCD - https://xkcd.com/2451/

  2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "That’ll make marketing think twice."

    Once would be a good start.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Actual Intelligence

      That would need them to have the above AI

    2. bryces666
      Thumb Up

      AI, yeah right...

      Hopefully we can stop hearing AI bandied about for everything when often it clearly is not! Go the EU, respect.

    3. ThatOne Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Came here to comment on the same thing. Marketing never thinks, they just follow their unhealthy mix of gut feeling and unadulterated greed.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        ...and then go in search of a "Data Scientist" to back up their crazy idea

    4. TimMaher Silver badge
      Pint

      Bummer

      I was going to say that @doc.

      ————>

  3. Lee D Silver badge

    I want to know how people can guarantee that some machine-learning thing trained on real data isn't including that real data inside itself in some way.

    Imagine if, say, your home address was part of the training data for Alexa or something. How do you prove that it's not retrievable from the machine-learnt algorithm?

    1. Filippo Silver badge

      They can't. That's (part of) why there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the AI evangelists. There's this neat statistical analysis thing we call "AI" (but we probably shouldn't), and it has some fundamental hard-to-fix problems. One of the biggest is that, once you train it, it's a black box.

      It may have retained some personally identifiable information, and it may not spit it out in millions of tests, and then spit it out in production for no discernable reason. It happened before, and nobody can prove their shiny new model won't do it again.

      In order to be consistant with the spirit of GDPR, this type of model should either be demonstrably not trained on PII at all, or should be considered as itself containing PII and therefore not be released to the public. I suspect the new legislation will think along these lines.

      Certain applications, while interesting and superficially harmless, will simply not be possible under such restrictions. Hence the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

      1. Paul Smith

        Stuff and nonesense

        If the model uses personally identifiable information, then it is not a legal model and it can not be used unless all GDPR steps have been taken. It can not 'retain' some data and not others, and it can not 'leak' data that it doesn't have to start with.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    That’ll make marketing think twice.

    I'm not sure why you think marketing even think once...

  5. codejunky Silver badge

    Bloody hell

    I got half way down reading and wondered if you were laughing your arse off as you wrote this article or if your actually serious. First GDPR is so wonderful world wide that they still cant get the US to play along. Wasnt it called privacy shield? What is it now?

    "America and China may have industrial and military dominance"

    Might? The EU upsets the Ruskies and runs to the US in a flash. The EU's dominance is in crisis making. Efforts to be seen as a big player is met with laughter or ignorance.

    "For businesses who implement, buy in or plan to use AI, this will sound like the worst sort of bureaucratic overreach, imposing all sorts of brakes and costs on the latest and greatest tools"

    Aka the world moves on and the EU legislates to remain behind. Hopefully the UK will take advantage of this too and not fall into the trap of stupidity.

    "AI is a brash, frontier world right now, and people are getting hurt."

    A new technology being deployed is still being developed. Hell if this kind of stupidity ruled we wouldnt have the aeroplane. Hell the vaccine rollout aught to teach them something.

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