Major tech founders, CEOs, VCs and industry giants across Europe have signed an open letter to the EU Commission, warning that Europe could miss out on the generative AI revolution if the EU passes laws stifling innovation.
Executives from 150 businesses highlighted the risks of tight regulation, saying the rules could threaten the ability of European companies to compete in AI.
With generative AI and it’s harmful impacts being the hot topic right now, I can see how the EU regulations are garnering so much attention and support right now. Even if they do pass the regulations, it’s still going to be important that other countries (US, Canada, Japan, South Korea, etc) get on board or I can easily see the EU being left behind in this space. Like you said, some sort of protections by the EU are going to be important.
With that said, I just don’t see how these regulations remain long term if there isn’t buy in from other countries.
The EU is a big enough economic bloc that they have the option of at least partially enforcing their laws, even without buy-in, such as with GDPR.
Basically if a company wants to ignore the EU regulations, they need to be content with never doing business in the entirety of the EU. If they already have a presence in the EU, that presence can be fined into a smouldering hole in the ground.
This also maybe presents an opportunity for the EU. AI is a technology that 1) needs creatives to feed it content, 2) tries to replace those creatives, leaving them without a living. It’s a technology that if left unchecked will eat its own tail and die, leaving us without creatives or AI. The EU could find opportunity in either investing in creative pursuits, or creating an environment for more sustainable AI development, even if their initial uptake is slower.
While GDPR is possible to enforce (and thrive) while the majority of the world doesn’t, I find it very difficult for its potential AI industry to do the same if the current draft resolution is passed and unchanged.
It’s still to early to tell if the current draft remains the same and is passed in the EU; but if it does, I think many companies will be content with pulling their business from the EU altogether. These regulations can severely limit the data moat that EU based AI companies can have if they want to create their own competitors, already leaving them in a big disadvantage against other companies who are trained in massive amounts of data that the EU may potentially say cannot be accessed.
Btw, I fully lean on the side of the EU with regulated what data AI companies can access and compensation for creatives. Like you said, AI can eat its own tail, which we already see happening with reports of LLMs being trained with other AI generated content.