Wednesday

31st May 2023

Column

AI has escaped the 'sandbox' — can it still be regulated?

Listen to article

Recently I was introduced to the concept of "algorithmic gifts" as part of a research interview on tech lobbying in Brussels. The question was how algorithmic favours might be used to get sway over the direction of debates and policy.

When Twitter released segments of its code a few weeks back we got a first, perhaps unsurprising, answer: far from the professed neutrality, posts from president Joe Biden, Elon Musk and a few dozen selected luminaries such as LeBron James, Ben Shapiro and Marc Andreessen get an additional, artificial push by Twitter's algorithm.

Read and decide

Join EUobserver today

Become an expert on Europe

Get instant access to all articles — and 20 years of archives. 14-day free trial.

... or subscribe as a group

  • In the contest between Silicon Valley tech mavens and Chinese state-controlled innovation, the window to act meaningfully from Europe often can appear vanishingly small

It only adds to previous questions as to where Musk's Twitter is heading, and more fundamentally of course, about the structure and integrity of today's platform-mediated public space. I have myself long wondered in the same vein whether Facebook's algorithm automatically restrains the visibility of posts that are critical of Meta/Facebook.

By now, algorithms create and redistribute power across most aspects of our social, economic and political life. We live in an algorithmic society and with that come steep ethical questions.

AI and singularity

Nowhere is the acceleration and disruption more evident than in artificial intelligence now. The combination of immense data sets, massive computational force and self-learning algorithms promises to unleash enormous powers — in every sense of the word.

In medical research, to take one example, the use of machine learning and mRNA-technology (the same as in the Covid-19 jab) holds tremendous potential. Vaccines against cancer, cardiovascular and auto-immune diseases could be ready as early as by the end of this decade.

Few would want to relinquish this promise. Much more contested is the emergence of so-called General Purpose Artificial Intelligence, or GPAI — self-learning algorithms capable of performing multiple, varied tasks to the extent of giving the impression of a sense of thought.

Within two months of its launch, the first application out of the starting blocks, ChatGPT, reached 100 million users, a pace not seen for any other tech consumer application.

As these users now play with prompts, the machine learns. The latest version of the software already boasts spectacular analytical and creative capacities, presaging future permutations into practical human activities from finance (and column writing!) to arts and sciences.

With the dynamics of exponential advance, the popular scare is that these powerful, 'intelligent' technologies will radically and unpredictably transform our reality — or even develop some form of life of their own.

It's difficult to blame the naysayers and doomsters. In Silicon Valley, wizards' apprentices, accoutred with a libertarian philosophy and venture capital, have long been yearning for the moment of 'technological singularity', a future where technological growth is out of control and irreversible.

In the mind of Ray Kurzweil, Google's chief of engineering and a key figure, the process towards singularity has already long begun and will happen around 2030 (note: the same as for the vaccines).

Computers will have human intelligence, and our (final) choice might be to put them inside our brains, connecting our neocortex to the cloud.

EU's AI Act on the spot

As often, Europeans will be the first to regulate, and can, by and large, take some pride in that. An Artificial Intelligence Act has been on EU lawmakers' table for two years with the aim of setting the guardrails for safe and lawful AI.

Certain AI practices such as social scoring will be prohibited and yet others, categorised as "high risk", will be subject to third-party audits and significant transparency by the legislation due to be finalised this year.

That is all good, but it's the response to the commercialisation of GPAI that now stands as the decisive test.

In truth EU lawmakers are very much in the dark about what to do. At a recent lunch with senior Brussels lawmakers and industry representatives, civil society voices raised the question whether it all could be stopped: the emphatic answer was it could only go faster.

Coincidentally, only days later, more than 1,000 AI experts wrote an open letter asking for a pause in the training of systems more powerful than GPT-4, saying that "AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity."

On the face of it, the wildfire spread of GPAI already marks a failure of European regulatory efforts. To check the unsupervised real-world testing of AI systems, the EU AI Act had envisaged regulatory 'sandboxes' establishing a controlled environment for the development, testing and validation of AI innovation.

Regulation is as ever reactive and lacks speed compared to the disruptive vitality of technology. Lawmakers must now figure out how to frame the unrestrained acceleration and futureproof regulation that will take effect in more than three years.

Competition policy certainly has a role to play to prevent a few GPAI 'gatekeepers' from becoming single entry points for AI tasks. Lawmakers must also consider how strict liability regimes can force developers to think twice about out-of-sandbox releases, without stifling European domestic developments in the global race ahead.

(Big) Tech ethics

In the contest between Silicon Valley tech mavens and Chinese state-controlled innovation, the window to act meaningfully from Europe often can appear vanishingly small. At the same time the stakes are lasting and high: we are peeking through an Aventine keyhole onto major future ethical and societal dilemmas linked to algorithmic powers.

For something as paradigmatic as AI, there's always the hold out hope that all actors will accept the necessity of open democratic debate, control and regulation.

Yet, we should also be wary of illusions: for all the talk of 'doing good' from innovators, most ventures are in the end governed by profit-maximising imperatives, rather than wider societal interest.

Big Tech's track record, in particular, sadly is appalling. When the EU debated the Digital Services Act in 2022, front groups and other forms of hidden lobbying were swarming all over it.

In a leaked internal memo, Google had then set out a list of by-every-means-possible tactics to fight effective EU regulation, for which Alphabet's CEO Sundar Pichai later had to apologise.

On the other side of the Atlantic, behaviour have been similarly, if not even more, brutal. Ahead of the US midterm elections in 2022, incumbent lawmakers faced arm-twisting threats of being unseated by Big Tech funding going to their political adversaries if congressional bills moved ahead.

Currently, it's lawmakers in Canada that are under fire in the context of regulatory initiatives on online news, broadcasting and online safety. In fact, it has gone so far that the Canadian parliament is undertaking what will be a world-first parliamentary study on the tech giants' use of intimidation and subversion tactics to evade regulation across the globe.

In the end, Europeans are perhaps not all alone at the hard edge of regulation. But what is needed is not just regulation, but a new and broader paradigm of what I call tech control.

Independence of research is one area where alarm bells are ringing. Former Google insider and AI-ethics researcher, now-Signal CEO, Meredith Whittaker, has attested how independence from corporate actors in AI ethics can be asphyxiated. Even within the EU AI ethics group it was hard to come by.

The defence of fundamental interests requires therefore, not just capable AI agencies and effective liability rules, but a wide ecosystem focused and acting on how technology and corporate powers direct our future. As Timnit Gebru, another AI ethics researcher forced out of Google, noted recently: for the time being, let's avoid ascribing agency to the algorithms — rather than to the organisations building them.

Author bio

Georg E. Riekeles is associate director and head of the Europe’s political economy programme at the European Policy Centre. Before joining the EPC, he served as diplomatic adviser to the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier and head of strategy, media and diplomatic relations in the European Commission’s Task force for EU-UK negotiations.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author's, not those of EUobserver.

Column

Can Mastodon be the first big social network 'Made in Europe'?

Mastodon is much more than a company registered in Berlin with one employee — founder, chief executive and only shareholder, the young programmer Eugen Rochko. He designed Mastodon as open software that allows people and groups to build a network.

Column

GPTChat could be 21st century Goethe's Sorcerer's Apprentice

Some argue that these are merely language models working with probabilities, that they have no human intelligence. But users do not care how these models generate language. They perceive it as human-like and they will often perceive it as authoritative.

Editorial

Okay, alright, AI might be useful after all

Large Language Models could give the powers trained data-journalists wield, to regular boring journalists like me — who don't know how to use Python. And that makes me tremendously excited, to be honest.

Big Tech's attempt to water down the EU AI act revealed

The launch of ChatGPT has sparked a worldwide debate on Artificial Intelligence systems. Amidst Big Tech's proclamations that these AI systems will revolutionise our daily lives, the companies are engaged in a fierce lobbying battle to water-down regulations.

The EU needs to foster tech — not just regulate it

The EU's ambition to be a digital superpower stands in stark contrast to the US — but the bigger problem is that it remains far better at regulation than innovation, despite decades of hand-wringing over Europe's technology gap.

EU export credits insure decades of fossil-fuel in Mozambique

European governments are phasing out fossil fuels at home, but continuing their financial support for fossil mega-projects abroad. This is despite the EU agreeing last year to decarbonise export credits — insurance on risky non-EU projects provided with public money.

Latest News

  1. Europe's TV union wooing Lavrov for splashy interview
  2. ECB: eurozone home prices could see 'disorderly' fall
  3. Adapting to Southern Europe's 'new normal' — from droughts to floods
  4. Want to stop forced migration from West Africa? Start by banning bottom trawling
  5. Germany unsure if Orbán fit to be 'EU president'
  6. EU Parliament chief given report on MEP abuse 30 weeks before sanction
  7. EU clashes over protection of workers exposed to asbestos
  8. EU to blacklist nine Russians over jailing of dissident

Stakeholders' Highlights

  1. International Sustainable Finance CentreJoin CEE Sustainable Finance Summit, 15 – 19 May 2023, high-level event for finance & business
  2. ICLEISeven actionable measures to make food procurement in Europe more sustainable
  3. World BankWorld Bank Report Highlights Role of Human Development for a Successful Green Transition in Europe
  4. Nordic Council of MinistersNordic summit to step up the fight against food loss and waste
  5. Nordic Council of MinistersThink-tank: Strengthen co-operation around tech giants’ influence in the Nordics
  6. EFBWWEFBWW calls for the EC to stop exploitation in subcontracting chains

Stakeholders' Highlights

  1. InformaConnecting Expert Industry-Leaders, Top Suppliers, and Inquiring Buyers all in one space - visit Battery Show Europe.
  2. EFBWWEFBWW and FIEC do not agree to any exemptions to mandatory prior notifications in construction
  3. Nordic Council of MinistersNordic and Baltic ways to prevent gender-based violence
  4. Nordic Council of MinistersCSW67: Economic gender equality now! Nordic ways to close the pension gap
  5. Nordic Council of MinistersCSW67: Pushing back the push-back - Nordic solutions to online gender-based violence
  6. Nordic Council of MinistersCSW67: The Nordics are ready to push for gender equality

Join EUobserver

Support quality EU news

Join us