AI: regulation proposal threatens Europe, say executives – 06/30/2023 – Tech

Artificial intelligence legislation proposed by the European Union will put Europe’s competitiveness and technological sovereignty at risk, according to an open letter signed by more than 160 executives from companies ranging from Renault to Meta.

The bloc’s lawmakers agreed to draft rules this month, under which systems such as ChatGPT will have to disseminate artificial intelligence-generated content, help distinguish so-called images deep fake of real ones and ensure safeguards against illegal content.

Since ChatGPT became popular, several open letters have been issued calling for regulation of the technology and raising the “risk of AI extinction”.

Past letter signatories have included Elon Musk, OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman, and Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio — two of the three so-called “godfathers of AI”.

The third, Yann LeCun, who works at Meta, signed this Friday’s letter challenging European Union regulations. Other signatories included executives from a diverse set of companies, including Spanish telecommunications company Cellnex, French software company Mirakl and German investment bank Berenberg.

Those companies, along with Renault and Meta, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“We are mainly targeting the European Parliament’s version because they decided to move from a risk-based approach to a technology-based one, which was not in the initial text,” said France’s former digital minister and one of the letter’s three organizers, Cedric O, told Reuters.

He, together with Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, founding partner of La Famiglia VC, and René Obermann, president of Airbus, organized the document.

The letter warned that under the bloc’s proposed rules, technologies such as generative artificial intelligence will become heavily regulated and companies that develop such systems could face high compliance costs and disproportionate liability risks.

Such regulation could lead highly innovative companies to move their activities abroad and investors to withdraw their capital from European AI development in general, he said.

“I am convinced that they did not read the text carefully, but reacted to the encouragement of some who have an interest in this topic,” Dragos Tudorache, who co-led the drafting of the bloc’s proposals, told Reuters. The suggestions made in the letter are already in the bill, he said.