Meta says it won't sign Europe AI agreement

Not just Meta, 40 EU companies urged EU to postpone roll out of the ai act by two years due to it's unclear nature. This code of practice is voluntary and goes beyond what is in the act itself. EU published it in a way to say that there would be less scrutiny if you voluntarily sign up for this code of practice. Meta would anyway face scrutiny on all ends, so does not seem to a plausible case to sign something voluntary.

One of the key aspects of the act is how a model provider is responsible if the downstream partners misuse it in any way. For open source, it's a very hard requirement[1].

> GPAI model providers need to establish reasonable copyright measures to mitigate the risk that a downstream system or application into which a model is integrated generates copyright-infringing outputs, including through avoiding overfitting of their GPAI model. Where a GPAI model is provided to another entity, providers are encouraged to make the conclusion or validity of the contractual provision of the model dependent upon a promise of that entity to take appropriate measures to avoid the repeated generation of output that is identical or recognisably similar to protected works.

[1] https://www.lw.com/en/insights/2024/11/european-commission-r...

Sounds like a reasonable guideline to me. Even for open source models, you can add a license term that requires users of the open source model to take "appropriate measures to avoid the repeated generation of output that is identical or recognisably similar to protected works"

This is European law, not US. Reasonable means reasonable and judges here are expected to weigh each side's interests and come to a conclusion. Not just a literal interpretation of the law.

Except that it’s seemingly impossible to prevent against prompt injection. The cat is out the bag. Much like a lot of other legislation (eg cookie law, being responsible for user generated content when you have millions of it posted per day) it’s entirely impractical albeit well-meaning.

I don't think the cookie law is that impractical? It's easy to comply with by just not storing non-essential user information. It would have been completely nondisruptive if platforms agreed to respect users' defaults via browser settings, and then converged on a common config interface.

It was made impractical by ad platforms and others who decided to use dark patterns, FUD and malicious compliance to deceive users into agreeing to be tracked.

Even EU government websites have horrible intrusive cookie banners. You can't blame ad companies, there are no ads on most sites

Because they track usage stats for site development purposes, and there was no convergence on an agreed upon standard interface for browsers since nobody would respect it. Their banners are at least simple yes/no ones without dark patterns.

But yes, perhaps they should have worked with e.g. Mozilla to develop some kind of standard browser interface for this.