EU Proposed AI Legislation Is A Threat To Open Source Software

Uploaded on 2023-08-10 in FREE TO VIEW

Governments around the world are wrestling with the best way to tackle AI safety and regulation. The EU AI Act is set to become the first comprehensive AI regulation and to offer a model for policymakers around the world.

But with this promise comes some risk. The Act may regulate upstream open source projects as if they are commercial products or deployed AI systems. Companies are now forming alliances to drive safety research for future models and the UK is pushing for a global approach.

The EU has one of the most prescriptive approaches to AI regulation and will have the first comprehensive law. And now the open source electronic community has serious concerns about a number of recent EU regulatory changes that pose a threat to the open source industry.

Firms including GitHub, Creative Commons, and Hugging Face have published a paper aimed at EU regulators requesting greater support for open source AI development in the upcoming AI Act.

Their list of suggestions to the European Parliament ahead of the final rules includes clearer definitions of AI components, clarifying that hobbyists and researchers working on open-source models are not commercially benefiting from AI, allowing limited real-world testing for AI projects, and setting proportional requirements for different foundation models.

The coalition outlined a series of suggestions for EU lawmakers in the paper, making a number of requests. These included more concise definitions of AI components and greater support and leeway for open source research into the development of AI models.

The main focus of the report is whether research and testing of AI models will be interpreted as “commercial activity” and thus subject to stringent rules under the act.

Under the EU guidelines, real-world testing of AI systems will not be granted exemption from the regulations, which the companies argued could be inhibitive to innovation and prove costly for enterprises. Instead, the coalition suggested a change in language to accommodate for testing which is done “on a limited scale with sufficient documentation and transparency to users”.

The EU Report’s Executive Summary states:

Open source, non-profit, and academic research and development play an essential role in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem.

Continuing to support and foster this open ecosystem will be paramount to ensuring that the technology serves all EU citizens on two main accounts:

First, the values of sound research, reproducibility, and transparency fostered by open science are instrumental to the development of safe and accountable AI systems.

Second, open source development can enable competition and innovation by new entrants and smaller players, including in the EU.

The AI Act holds promise to set a global precedent in regulating AI to address its risks while encouraging innovation. A key focus here centers around whether research and testing of AI models will be interpreted as “commercial activity” and thus subject to stringent rules under the act.

These EU guidelines say that the real-world testing of AI systems will not be granted exemption from the regulations, which the companies argued could be inhibitive to innovation and prove costly for enterprises.

Instead, the coalition suggested a change in language to accommodate for testing which is done “on a limited scale with sufficient documentation and transparency to users... Research and development (R&D) is crucial to the development of beneficial, trustworthy AI systems" the paper says.

“The act should recognise that some real-world testing, including preliminary exploration of a model’s appropriateness to specific deployment conditions and allowing scrutiny and evaluation by relevant civil society organisations outside of the development chain, can be necessary and appropriate for R&D.”

ITPro: Github: Computing: Tech Monitor: Github: Digwatch: The Verge

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