A.I.’s un-learning problem: Researchers say it’s virtually impossible to make an A.I. model ‘forget’ the things it learns from private user data

https://lemmy.world/post/4202487

A.I.’s un-learning problem: Researchers say it’s virtually impossible to make an A.I. model ‘forget’ the things it learns from private user data - Lemmy.world

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)

“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?

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

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.

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.

I’m european. I have a right to be forgotten.
The “safeguard” would be “no PII in training data, ever”. Which is fine by me, but that’s what it really means. Retraining a large dataset every time a GDPR request comes in is completely infeasible.