Europeans Are About to Find Out How Entrenched AI Is in Their Daily Lives
Europeans Are About to Find Out How Entrenched AI Is in Their Daily Lives
欧洲人即将发现人工智能在日常生活中有多么根深蒂固
Advertisements, music recommendations, calendar management apps, and complaint hotlines—if they use AI, Europeans will need to be told. 广告、音乐推荐、日程管理应用和投诉热线——如果它们使用了人工智能，欧洲人将有权获知这一信息。
Starting on Sunday, citizens of the European Union must be informed when they are interacting with an AI system or viewing content generated or altered by the technology. These new transparency regulations come as part of the bloc’s Artificial Intelligence Act, which goes into effect August 2. The act is intended to reduce deception and manipulation, and help people make informed choices within the wider aim of fostering trustworthy AI in Europe. 从周日开始，欧盟公民在与人工智能系统互动，或查看由该技术生成或修改的内容时，必须得到明确告知。这些新的透明度法规是欧盟《人工智能法案》的一部分，该法案于 8 月 2 日生效。该法案旨在减少欺骗和操纵行为，帮助人们做出明智的选择，其更宏大的目标是在欧洲培育值得信赖的人工智能。
“If a provider’s really compliant with the transparency obligations, it will become very visible how much AI is used,” Frederiek Fernhout, a technology lawyer at Stibbe, tells WIRED. “Especially in marketing.” “如果提供商真正遵守了透明度义务，人工智能的使用频率将变得非常显眼，” Stibbe 律师事务所的技术律师 Frederiek Fernhout 在接受《连线》（WIRED）采访时表示，“尤其是在营销领域。”
Ads or corporate social media posts using deepfakes will be slapped with a label stating they are AI-generated. Chatbots and hotlines handling complaints and other issues will have to state clearly if they are AI-based. Call centers using machine learning to monitor caller emotions and detect frustration will need to declare they are doing so at the start of the call. 使用深度伪造（deepfakes）技术的广告或企业社交媒体帖子将被贴上“人工智能生成”的标签。处理投诉和其他问题的聊天机器人及热线电话必须明确说明其是否基于人工智能。使用机器学习来监测来电者情绪并检测其挫败感的呼叫中心，需要在通话开始时声明正在进行此类监测。
Even among businesses, any commercial use of the technology, including scheduling appointments, handling correspondence, or negotiating contracts, will have to be declared. If companies don’t comply, they will face fines of up to €15 million ($17 million) or 3 percent of worldwide annual turnover—whichever is higher. 即使在企业内部，任何商业用途的技术应用，包括安排预约、处理信件或协商合同，都必须进行申报。如果公司不遵守规定，将面临最高 1500 万欧元（约合 1700 万美元）或全球年度营业额 3% 的罚款，以较高者为准。
Model developers will also be subject to the new law, and will be monitored by the European Commission’s recently established AI Office. That includes companies beyond the obvious examples of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. Thibau Duquin, a technology and data lawyer at Stibbe, pointed to firms like Spotify, which uses AI-powered recommendations, or Adobe for its AI editing features in Photoshop. 模型开发者也将受到新法律的约束，并由欧盟委员会新成立的人工智能办公室进行监管。这不仅包括 OpenAI、Anthropic 和 Google DeepMind 等显而易见的例子，还包括其他公司。Stibbe 律师事务所的技术与数据律师 Thibau Duquin 指出，像使用人工智能推荐功能的 Spotify，或在 Photoshop 中提供人工智能编辑功能的 Adobe 等公司也在监管范围内。
“When you start looking, it’s everywhere, and all this content will have to be labeled from now on,” says Duquin. “当你开始留意时，你会发现它无处不在，从现在起，所有这些内容都必须贴上标签，” Duquin 说道。
The reach of the new law could lead to information overload, critics say. “Excessive labeling can cause ‘banner blindness’ with endless notifications,” Boniface de Champris, AI policy lead at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, warned in December. “If we have to label everything, from simple spell-checked emails to photos with a filter, the labeling of AI content will lose all meaning.” 批评人士称，新法律的覆盖范围可能会导致信息过载。计算机与通信行业协会（CCIA）的人工智能政策负责人 Boniface de Champris 在去年 12 月警告称：“过度的标签化可能会导致‘横幅盲区’，让用户淹没在无休止的通知中。如果我们必须标记一切，从简单的拼写检查邮件到带有滤镜的照片，那么人工智能内容的标签将失去所有意义。”
The new legislation is resonant of the EU’s privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force in 2018. In granting consumers new rights to understand and control how companies used their personal information, the regulation changed how people experience the web. It introduced ubiquitous cookie-consent pop-ups, leaving many web users with “cookie fatigue,” and caused a scramble by businesses to comply. 这项新立法让人联想到欧盟 2018 年生效的隐私法——《通用数据保护条例》（GDPR）。该条例赋予了消费者了解和控制公司如何使用其个人信息的新权利，从而改变了人们使用网络的方式。它引入了无处不在的 Cookie 同意弹窗，导致许多网络用户产生“Cookie 疲劳”，并引发了企业为合规而进行的忙乱应对。
The challenges of adopting and enforcing such technical regulations resonate too, says Fernhout. “Still, a lot of terms are not clear and need specific guidance from the authorities, and I think the same will happen here,” she says. “It is also very technical so these requirements need to be built into the underlying systems as well, which complicates it.” Fernhout 表示，采用和执行此类技术法规所面临的挑战也如出一辙。“目前，许多条款尚不明确，需要当局提供具体指导，我认为这里也会发生同样的情况，”她说，“此外，这非常专业，因此这些要求需要内置到底层系统中，这增加了实施的复杂性。”
The EU has allowed for a transitional period, until December, for AI model providers to label synthetic audio, image, video, or text in a machine-readable format so that this material can be detected as AI-generated, clearly recognizing the technical challenge of implementing this. Other compliance deadlines within the act have been delayed, as the European AI Office has taken longer than expected to produce key compliance guidelines. 欧盟已允许提供一个过渡期（至今年 12 月），让人工智能模型提供商以机器可读的格式标记合成音频、图像、视频或文本，以便这些材料能被识别为人工智能生成。这清楚地表明欧盟意识到了实施过程中的技术挑战。法案中的其他合规截止日期已被推迟，因为欧洲人工智能办公室制定关键合规指南的时间超出了预期。
The bloc’s 27 member countries are also at different stages of setting up their supervisory frameworks, meaning enforcement “might not be as day one immediate or uniform as we think,” Rosie Nance, a data and AI regulatory lawyer at Norton Rose Fulbright, tells WIRED, cautioning “we’re not necessarily going to see consistent enforcement straight away.” 欧盟 27 个成员国在建立各自监管框架方面处于不同阶段，这意味着执法“可能不会像我们想象的那样在第一天就立即生效或保持统一，” Norton Rose Fulbright 律师事务所的数据与人工智能监管律师 Rosie Nance 在接受《连线》采访时表示，并提醒道：“我们未必能立即看到一致的执法行动。”
Nevertheless, the sweeping reach of the regulation will eventually be a “gamechanger” for companies, Duquin says. “Will they be comfortable with labeling it, or will they go back to using systems that are not AI-based? Will they go back to doing things manually, or are they willing to take the risk of being transparent about how much AI they use, and continue to use AI for everything and disclose it as such?” 尽管如此，Duquin 认为，该法规的广泛影响最终将成为企业的“游戏规则改变者”。“他们会乐于贴上标签，还是会回归使用非人工智能系统？他们会选择回到人工操作，还是愿意承担透明化披露人工智能使用程度的风险，继续在一切事务中使用人工智能并如实披露？”