Explainable AI and new AI regulation from the EU

Hey all,

Pretty big news in the last week, putting trustworthy machine learning back in the spotlight: a new EU proposal to regulate AI.

Hopefully this convinces you to check out this week’s video, which is an overview of methods used for explainable AI.

The EU announced a new AI regulation proposal that categorises AI systems into various categories of risk. It outright prohibits the use of AI systems deemed as “unacceptable risk” e.g. certain scenarios like social scoring and real-time biometric identification (think facial recognition like Clearview.ai). However, there appears to be a grey area surrounding exceptions for law enforcement.

AI systems deemed as “high-risk” will be subject to regulation that essentially will enforce some of the practices being researched in trustworthy ML: robustness, transparency and ensuring “high-quality” datasets which aren’t biased.

I’m not a legal scholar, but overall

the gist of this proposal seems to be to fit AI around the existing framework for EU citizens’ rights. And yes, this is just a proposal, so we’re years away from real legislation being passed, as there’s a lot to iron out to make this actually enforceable.

Still, I’m glad we’re at least discussing the real-world consequences of AI. Hopefully this ends up being as significant as GDPR was.

It seemed that the last video on my 5 Year Machine Learning Journey really struck a chord with the r/learnmachinelearning community, gaining over 1.5k views in just 24 hours and becoming the most popular video on the channel.

Just last week I was discussing how we’d gone past 200 subscribers and within the next 24 hours we’d gained another 125, crossing 300 in the blink of an eye!

This only makes me more motivated to deliver content that will hopefully provide great value to you all.

Till next time,

Mukul