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So is a burglar alarm that uses AI to see a person on your property and alert the owner (Same function as the old PIR sensors) now AI tech that is predicting that there is a person that might be wanting to commit a crime and thus a banned use of AI now?

Or is it something that is open to interpretation, let the courts sort of out and fine you 15,000,000 euros if someone in the EU has leverage on the courts and doesn't like you?

Oh and the courts will already kill any small startup.



From the act:

> to assess or predict the risk of a natural person committing a criminal offence, based solely on the profiling of a natural person or on assessing their personality traits and characteristics;

more details in recital 42: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/recital/42/


In all fairness, that would still ban a system that understands my front door being approached by a guy in a postal uniform wearing a parcel is likely unproblematic, while a guy wearing a hoodie and a crowbar is likely to commit a crime.


no it doesn't because here you are accessing their actions (approaching your front door in some unusual context like holding a crow bar)

in addition, having front doors idk. calling the police on people just because it's a "unusual" situation would be quite dystopian and would most likely for society as a whole lead to far more damage then it would prevent so instead of your door trying to "detect maybe soon to happen crime" it could "try to detect unusual situation which might require human actions" and then have the human (you someone or in a call center if you aren't available) do the actions (which might be just one or two button presses, nothing prevents you to take the action by directing the AI to do it for you)

and lets not forget we are speaking about before the break in (and maybe no break in at all because it's actually a Halloween costume or similar), if the system detects someone braking in we have a action


Not really. Such a system would be evaluating the whole context and not solely profiling the person. What the person is doing (delivering parcel vs cutting a chain link fence) is not a part of their personality or profile. How much danger they’re posing in the moment also isn’t, and so on.

Arguably, an AI security system with great objective understanding of the unfolding circumstances would be a lot better than one profiling people passing by and raising an alarm each time a person that looks a certain way walks by.

It’s just that simple CV-based classification, perhaps trained with unsupervised learning, is easier in AI than observing a chain of actions. The labelled data set is usually accessible from police orgs if you want to simply train an AI to look at people and judge them based on visual traits. By the EU saying “this easy way is not good enough”, it is encouraging technological development in a way. Develop a system that’s more objective than visual profiling, and the market is yours.


> Develop a system that’s more objective than visual profiling, and the market is yours.

Until another braindead legislator finds another thing he can rally against and throws a stick between my legs.

There are reasons innovation happens in China and - to a lower extend - in the United States. This is one of them.


How so?




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