Latest news with #GPAI
Euronews
22-05-2025
- Business
- Euronews
'Thank you for the copyright': ABBA legend warns against AI code
ABBA member Björn Ulvaeus warned MEPs in Brussels on Tuesday that he is concerned about 'proposals driven by Big Tech' that weaken creative rights under the EU's AI Act. 'I am pro-tech, but I am concerned about current proposals that are being driven by the tech sector to weaken creative rights,' Ulvaeus told a hearing in the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education on Tuesday. The comments from the singer songwriter - who is the president of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) - add to concerns voiced by the creative industry, including publishers and rights holders in recent months, on the drafting process of a voluntary Code of Practice on General Purpose AI (GPAI) for large language models like ChatGPT under the AI Act. The European Commission appointed 13 experts to consider the issue last September, using plenary sessions and workshops to allow some 1,000 participants to share feedback. The draft texts since published aimed at helping providers of AI models comply with the EU's AI rulebook, but publishers criticised them for the interplay with copyright rules, while US tech giants complained about the 'restrictive' and burdensome effects. 'The argument that AI can only be achieved if copyright is weakened is false and dangerous. AI should not be built on theft, it would be an historic abandonment of principles,' Ulvaeus said. 'The EU has been a champion of creative rights. But now we see that the Code ignores calls from the creative sector for transparency. What we want is for the EU to lead on AI regulation, not to backslide,' he said, adding that the implementation of the act should 'stay true to the original objective'. The latest draft, due early May, was delayed because the Commission received a large number of requests to leave the consultations open longer than originally planned. The aim is to publish the latest draft before the summer. On 2 August, the rules on GP AI tools enter into force. The administration led by US President Donald Trump has said the EU's digital rules, including the Code, stifle innovation. The US Mission to the EU sent a letter to the EU executive pushing back against the Code in April. Similar concerns were voiced by US Big Tech companies: Meta's global policy chief, Joel Kaplan, said in February that it would not sign the code because it had issues with the text as it then stood. A senior official working at the Commission's AI Office told Euronews earlier this month however, that US companies 'are very proactive' and that there is not the sense that 'they are pulling back because of a change in the administration.' The AI Act itself - which regulates AI tools according to the risk they pose to society - entered into force in August last year. Its provisions apply gradually, before the Act will be fully applicable in 2027. The EU executive can decide to formalise the Code under the AI Act, through an implementing act. Sir Elton John recently described the UK government as "absolute losers" and said he felt "incredibly betrayed" over plans to exempt technology firms developing AI from copyright laws. The European Commission will offer relief to small mid-cap companies burdened by the current scope of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in a rule simplification package known as an Omnibus to be published on Wednesday, according to a working document seen by Euronews. Currently, companies with fewer than 250 employees are exempt from the data privacy rules to reduce their administrative costs, the Commission now proposes to extend this derogation to the so-called small mid-cap companies. Small mid-cap companies can employ up to 500 employees and make higher turnovers. Under the plan - the Commission's fourth such Omnibus - such companies will only have to keep a record of the processing of the users' data when it's considered 'high risk', for example private medical information. The change comes seven years after the GDPR took effect. Since then the rulebook has shielded consumer data from US tech giants but is also perceived as burdensome for smaller and mid-sized companies that often did not have the means to hire data protection lawyers. The biggest fine issued under the rules so far is €1.2 billion on US tech giant Meta: the Irish data protection authority fined the company in 2023 for invalid data transfers. Although fines are generally lower for smaller businesses, at up to €20 million or 4% of annual turnover they remain significant. In the Netherlands for example, VoetbalTV, a video platform for amateur football games, was fined €575,000 by the Dutch privacy regulator in 2018. Although the company appealed and the court overturned the fine, it had to file for bankruptcy. Both EU lawmaker Axel Voss (Germany/EPP), who was involved in steering the legislation through the European Parliament, and Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems, whose organisation NOYB filed numerous data protection complaints with regulators, called for different rules for smaller companies earlier this year. Under the plan, 90% of the businesses – small retailers and manufacturers -- would just face minor compliance tasks and would not need an in-house data protection officer anymore, no excessive documentation and lower administrative fines, capped at €500,000. Voss said his proposal would not weaken the EU's privacy standards, but make it 'more enforceable, and more proportionate'. Similar calls are coming from the member states: the new German government stressed in its coalition plan that it will work on EU level to ensure that 'non-commercial activities (for example, associations), small and medium-sized enterprises, and low-risk data processing are exempt from the scope of the GDPR.' By contrast, civil society and consumer groups have warned that the Commission's plan to ease GDPR rules could have unintended consequences. On Tuesday, privacy advocacy group EDRi stated in an open letter that the change risks 'weakening key accountability safeguards' by making data protection obligations depend on company size rather than the actual risk to people's rights. It also fears this could lead to further pressure to roll back other parts of the GDPR. Consumer advocates share similar concerns, in a letter from late April, pan-European consumer group BEUC warned that even small companies can cause serious harm through data breaches. It argued that using headcount or turnover as a basis for exemptions could create legal uncertainty and go against EU fundamental rights. Both groups say the focus should instead be on better enforcement of existing rules and more practical support for small companies. Meanwhile reforms of the data privacy law are under negotiation between the Council and the European Parliament. A new round of political discussions on the GDPR Procedural Regulation is expected to take place on Wednesday. EU institutions are attempting to finalise a long-awaited deal to improve cooperation between national data protection authorities. The regulation is meant to address delays and inconsistencies in how cross-border cases are handled under the GDPR, by harmonising procedures and timelines. According to experts familiar with the file, one of the main sticking points is whether to introduce binding deadlines for national authorities to act on complaints. While the Parliament has pushed for clearer timelines to speed up enforcement, some member states argue that fixed deadlines could overwhelm authorities and increase legal risks. This change is however not expected to impact the Commission's 4th Omnibus package.
Euronews
20-05-2025
- Business
- Euronews
'Thank you for the copyright' - ABBA warns against AI Code
ABBA front man Björn Ulvaeus warned MEPs in Brussels on Tuesday that he is concerned about 'proposals driven by Big Tech' that weaken creative rights under the EU's AI Act. 'I am pro-tech, but I am concerned about current proposals that are being driven by the tech sector to weaken creative rights,' Ulvaeus told a hearing in the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education on Tuesday. The comments from the singer songwriter - who is the President of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) - add to concerns voiced by the creative industry, including publishers and rights holders in recent months, on the drafting process of a voluntary Code of Practice on General Purpose AI (GPAI) for large language models like ChatGPT under the AI Act. The European Commission appointed thirteen experts to consider the issue last September, using plenary sessions and workshops to allow some 1,000 participants to share feedback. The draft texts since published aimed at helping providers of AI models comply with the EU's AI rulebook, but were criticised by publishers for the interplay with copyright rules, while US tech giants complained about the 'restrictive' and burdensome effects. 'The argument that AI can only be achieved if copyright is weakened is false and dangerous. AI should not be built on theft, it would be an historic abandonment of principles,' Ulvaeus said. 'The EU has been a champion of creative rights. But now we see that the Code ignores calls from the creative sector for transparency. What we want is for the EU to lead on AI regulation, not to backslide,' he said, adding that the implementation of the act should 'stay true to the original objective'. The latest draft, which was due early May, was delayed because the Commission received a large number of requests to leave the consultations open longer than originally planned. The aim is to publish the latest draft before the summer. On 2 August, the rules on GP AI tools enter into force. The administration led by Republican President Donald Trump has said the EU's digital rules, including the Code, stifle innovation. The US government's Mission to the EU sent a letter to the EU executive pushing back against the Code in April. Similar concerns were voiced by US Big Tech companies: Meta's global policy chief, Joel Kaplan, said in February that it will not sign the code because it had issues with the text as it then stood. A senior official working at the Commission's AI Office told Euronews earlier this month however, that US companies 'are very proactive' and that there is not the sense that 'they are pulling back because of a change in the administration.' The AI Act itself - which regulates AI tools according to the risk they pose to society - entered into force in August last year. Its provisions apply gradually, before the Act will be fully applicable in 2027. The EU executive can decide to formalise the Code under the AI Act, through an implementing act. Sir Elton John recently described the UK government as "absolute losers" and said he felt "incredibly betrayed" over plans in the UK to exempt technology firms developing AI from copyright laws.
Euronews
16-05-2025
- Business
- Euronews
EU Commission still lacking AI scientific advisor despite applications
The European Commission hasn't yet found a lead scientific adviser for its AI Office despite receiving 'dozens of applications', and the rules on General-Purpose AI (GPAI) kicking in on 2 August. The recruitment process is still ongoing despite the job vacancy being opened between November and December last year, a senior official working at the AI Office told Euronews. The adviser's role will be to 'ensure an advanced level of scientific understanding on General-Purpose AI (GPAI).' 'They will lead the scientific approach on General-Purpose AI on all aspects of the work of the AI Office, ensuring scientific rigor and integrity of AI initiatives,' the ad said, adding that 'they will particularly focus on the testing and evaluation of General-Purpose AI models, in close collaboration with the 'Safety Unit' of the AI Office.' The Commission's work on the GPAI – such as large language models like ChatGPT – is also still ongoing: the 2 May deadline for publication of the voluntary Code of Practice on GPAI, which should help providers of AI models comply with the EU's AI Act, was not met. The EU executive appointed thirteen experts last September, using plenary sessions and workshops to allow some 1,000 participants to share feedback. An official told Euronews the process is delayed because the Commission 'received a number of requests to leave the consultations open longer than originally planned.' The previous texts were criticised by publishers about the interplay with copyright rules, and from US Big Tech companies about 'being restrictive' and burdensome to innovation. Thomas Regnier, a Commission spokesperson on digital matters, said at a press conference on Friday that the aim is to publish the latest draft 'before the summer'. On 2 August, the rules on GP AI tools enter into force. The AI Act itself - which regulates AI tools according to the risk they pose to society - entered into force in August last year. Its provisions apply gradually, before the Act will be fully applicable in 2027. The Commission said it would prefer a candidate from a European country for the lead scientific advisor role. In 2023, the EU executive was criticised for appointing US national Fiona Scott Morton as chief economist. This post would have given her a say in any fines or sanctions imposed on Big Tech firms, the US digital giants, under the EU's digital markets rules. The Commission said in response that EU rules allow all institutions, under certain conditions, to employ non-EU staff members based on the needs of the service. Scott Morton ultimately withdrew from her appointment after a political backlash including criticism from French President Emmanuel Macron about the choice of a non-EU candidate for the role. The Commission's AI Office is planning to grow to 140 full time positions by the end of this year: up from 100 currently.
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Publishers, journalists and film producers attack ‘fundamentally flawed' plan for enforcing Europe's new AI law
A broad coalition, including journalists, publishers, and film and music industry heavy weights has weighed in against the latest draft of proposed regulations that will govern how companies can comply with Europe's new AI Act. The coalition, which represents major copyright holders, say that the current draft will not ensure that AI companies respect the terms of either the AI Act itself or European Union copyright law. The statement from the news, media and entertainment industry organizations heaps further pressure on the EU to either overhaul or reject the "code of practice" that will tell big AI companies how they should compny with the EU AI Act. Friday's copyright-related intervention comes days after some of the lawmakers who negotiated the AI Act warned that the third draft had heavily watered down requirements for the AI companies to test their models for 'systemic risks' to society and fundamental rights. The former negotiators said the current wording was at odds with the AI law itself, and could allow serious harm to elections and the European economy. The new statement from the major copyright holders said the draft code of practice 'sets the bar so low as to provide no meaningful assistance for authors, performers and other rightsholders to exercise or enforce their rights' when the AI companies' web crawlers encounter their content while looking for fresh data for their models. The AI Act obliges AI companies to respect rightsholders' wishes, regarding the use of their copyrighted works for model training. The new EU law, which is the most comprehensive of its kind anywhere in the world, will start to apply to providers of 'general purpose AI' (GPAI) models such as OpenAI's GPT-4o in early August, so time is running out for the industry to receive clear guidance. The code of practise, which is being crafted by external experts for the European Commission's new AI Office, is now on its third draft. The fourth and final draft is expected in May. 'No code would be better than the fundamentally flawed third draft,' said the rightsholder groups. The group includes the likes of the International Federation of Film Producers' Associations, the Federation of European Publishers, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, and the International Federation of Journalists. The code's drafting process is coming under heavy lobbying and political pressure from the U.S.—where there is no federal AI law, but the technology's copyright implications of AI are also a fiercely contested. For the rightsholders, one big problem is that the draft code doesn't give them options for how to reject the use of their copyrighted works for training—the only method it treats as inviolable is the venerable but frequently-ignored protocol, which website operators can use to ask web scrapers to stay away. They complain that the draft code also doesn't give the AI companies any guidance about how to comply with such mechanisms. The rightsholders also say the latest version of the draft makes matters worse by no longer forcing AI companies to be transparent about how they comply with rightsholders' requests to protect their content from scraping. 'A key objective of the AI Act is to give authors, performers and other rightsholders tools to exercise and enforce their rights by requiring general-purpose AI providers to put in place measures to comply with EU copyright law and provide a sufficiently detailed summary of the content ingested and used for training,' they said. 'The third draft of the GPAI Code of Practice represents yet another step away from achieving this objective.' Approached for comment on Friday, the European Commission reiterated what it said earlier this week regarding the systemic-risks warning: that the code was a compromise, and the Commission would look at the final draft before deciding whether to approve it. Over in the U.S., there is no sign that the deregulation-friendly Trump administration will try to introduce anything as expansive as the EU AI Act. However, there is pressure from the industry to at least establish some federal rules to preempt the hundreds of sometimes mismatched state-level AI bills, and also to provide more legal certainty—particularly on the copyright issue, where many high-profile lawsuits are yet to be resolved. Evidence uncovered in one of those cases—where authors like Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates are suing Meta—revealed in January that Meta knowingly trained its models on a library of pirated books called LibGen. (The latest draft of the contentious EU code says AI companies only need to make 'reasonable efforts' not to crawl piracy websites.) The Trump administration is in the process of coming up with an 'AI action plan' and recently asked for industry input. OpenAI recommended that the U.S. should give AI companies a clear copyright exemption, on the alleged basis that Chinese companies don't respect copyright law, so U.S. firms would be disadvantaged if they had to do so. Thomson Reuters, which recently won a case against a now-defunct tech firm that had copied its content to create an AI platform for lawyers, has come out against OpenAI's proposals. 'We believe very strongly that copyright needs to be respected as part of the development process in AI,' chief product officer David Wong told Fortune on Thursday. 'There is significant intellectual capital that goes into producing these works.' Wong pointed out that Thomson Reuters is itself incorporating AI across its software platforms for sectors such as law and accounting—actually a far greater part of its business than its more well-known news offerings—so it wasn't 'trying to preserve an antiquated way of working.' However, he said it was essential to 'make sure there is fairness' in the way AI companies deal with 'those that create the content that will power and feed those systems.' Without that balance, Wong said, content creators could decide to make it even harder for anyone to access their works. The British government has also been considering adding a copyright exemption for AI companies, triggering an outpouring of outrage from the U.K.'s vital creative sectors. Technology secretary Peter Kyle said this week that musicians and filmmakers should not "resist change or try to make change too difficult to deliver." This story was originally featured on
Euronews
12-03-2025
- Business
- Euronews
Lawmakers to scrutinise AI influence on finance, copyright
The reports come as the financial sector and publishers have been calling for clarity on how the AI Act applies to their industries. ADVERTISEMENT The European Parliament will begin work on two own-initiative reports on the impact of artificial intelligence on the financial sector and on copyright, after they were approved by chairs of political groups last week, sources have told Euronews. The first, to consider the 'Impact of artificial intelligence on the financial sector' will be drafted by lawmaker Arba Kokalari (Sweden/EPP) and was requested by the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) with input from the Internal Market Committee (IMCO), Parliament sources confirmed. Work on the AI Act – the framework that regulates AI via a risk-based approach – last year was mainly carried out by the IMCO and the Civil Liberties Committee (LIBE). The rules started gradually applying last year and will be fully in force in 2027. Last June, the European Commission launched a consultation and a workshop series to seek input from stakeholders on the use of AI in finance to help assess risks related to the implementation of the AI Act, but it has not proposed any concrete action for the sector. Earlier this month, NGO Finance Watch warned about the possible conflict between AI functions and the principles of financial regulation. Without clear rules and accountability mechanisms, the use of AI in financial services 'introduces risks that are difficult to detect and control, threatening consumer protection and market stability while undermining trust in the wider financial system,' Finance Watch said. Copyright The second report – both will not be legally binding – 'Copyright and Generative AI: opportunities and challenges', was requested by the Legal Affairs Committee (JURI), and will be drafted by Axel Voss (Germany/EPP). 'During the AI Act negotiations, nobody wanted to talk about copyright. Now, writers, musicians and creatives are left exposed by an irresponsible legal gap. What I do not understand is that we are supporting big tech instead of protecting European creative ideas and content,' Voss said in a post on LinkedIn earlier last month. Complications surrounding AI and copyright arose during the drafting of a proposed set of rules for providers of General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) - a process still ongoing. The Code of Practice on GPAI should help providers of AI models – tools that can perform many tasks such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and picture application Midjourney – comply with the EU's AI Act, but industry, including rightsholders expressed concerns about contradictions with copyright law.
