I’m rather curious to see how the EU’s privacy laws are going to handle this.

(Original article is from Fortune, but Yahoo Finance doesn’t have a paywall)

  • DigitalWebSlinger@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    90
    ·
    2 years ago

    “AI model unlearning” is the equivalent of saying “removing a specific feature from a compiled binary executable”. So, yeah, basically not feasible.

    But the solution is painfully easy: you remove the data from your training set (ie, the source code), and re-train your model (recompile the executable).

    Yes, it may cost you a lot of time and money to accomplish this, but such are the consequences of breaking the law. Maybe be extra careful about obeying laws going forward, eh?

    • Ajen@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      2 years ago

      removing a specific feature from a compiled binary executable

      That’s actually very feasible. Compiled binaries translate directly to assembly, which is taught to most (all?) comp sci undergrads. When the binary is compiled by a standard compiler the translated assembly is very easy to understand, and for software that has protections/obfuscations like DRM and viruses there are reverse engineering tools like IDA Pro.

    • Dkarma@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      It takes so.much money to retrain models tho…like the entire cost all over again …and what if they find something else?

      Crazy how murky the legalities are here …just no caselaw to base anything on really

      For people who don’t know how machine learning works at a very high level

      basically every input the AI is trained on or “sees” changes a set of weights (float type decimal numbers) and once the weights are changed you can’t remove that input and change the weights back to what they were you can only keep changing them on new input

      • DigitalWebSlinger@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        2 years ago

        So we just let them break the law without penalty because it’s hard and costly to redo the work that already broke the law? Nah, they can put time and money towards safeguards to prevent themselves from breaking the law if they want to try to make money off of this stuff.

        • Dkarma@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          2 years ago

          No one has established that they’ve broken the law in any way, though. Authors are upset but it’s unclear if they can prove they were damaged in some way or that the companies in question are even liable for anything.

          Remember,the burden of proof is on the plaintiff not these companies if a suit is brought.

    • AWittyUsername@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 years ago

      Much like DLLs exist for compiled binary executables, could we not have modular AI training data? Then only a small chunk would need to be relearned at a time.

      Just throwing this into the void here.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        2 years ago

        The difference in between having or not something in the training set of a Neural Network is going to be different values for non-integer factors all over the neural network and, worse, it is just as like that they’re tiny differences as it is that they’re massive differences.

        Or to give you a decent metaphor for it, “it would be like trying to remove a specific egg from a bowl of scrambled eggs”.