A Weeping and gnashing of teeth
Can be heard around the world. About bloody time
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 …
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?
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.
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.