Every so often humanity vomits-up a sect or cult that decides to do away with sexual reproduction on the grounds that it’s unregulated fun and therefore immoral; and almost inevitably this trait leads to what is called “ideological…” or “doctrinal self-extinction“.

Thus the EU and its intention to regulate the training of LLMs in the attached thread by Kay.

Rather than argue I will just sit back and observe that Europe is historically poorly represented in tech — there’s a reason that UNICODE is backwards compatible with ASCII, and what does that initial A stand for? — and if the EU makes “the Europhone Internet” hostile to being scraped for LLM training, it will simply be elided from training material going forward. AIs will become “euroblind” and EU citizens will suffer comparatively sub-optimal tech in the name of taking back control.

Hm. Where have I heard that before?

Of course, then the regulators will engage again in order to demand equal, equitable, or proportionate representation of European Languages in otherwise Global LLMs, because for some reason the ones which evolved via their protectionism have all failed to compete.

National DPAs, under the umbrella of the EDPB, have consistently taken a consumer protection focus to data-protection, adopting a philosophy that data should not be processed, or at least data processing should be avoided unless absolutely unavoidable.

— Kay Jebelli ?? (@KayJebelli) July 17, 2024