Today, at the third edition of the “Festival del Metaverso” by Angi, “AI&VR Festival, Multiverse World” Flavio Arzarello, Public Policy Manager, Economic and Regulatory policy, in Italy by Meta spoke on the panel Regulation and development: Europe at the crossroads , Agostino Ghiglia, Member of the Board of the Guarantor for the protection of personal data, Guido Boella, Deputy Vice-Rector of the University of Turin for relations with companies and Co-founder of Società Italiana per l’Etica dell’Intelligenza Artificiale; Giulia Tancredi, Managing Director at Bi Elle Srl and President of the Confindustria Piemonte Young Entrepreneurs Group and Manila Di Giovanni, Founder and CEO of DWorld. At the center of the debate, European regulation and the risks for innovation and businesses.
Meta manager Flavio Arzarello said: “We must ensure that this often excessive regulation does not deprive European businesses and citizens of many services. The issue is not so much the rules but their application. In Europe we have more than 100 digital standards and 270 regulators. It is extremely complicated for companies whose services are cross-border to operate in a system with this legal uncertainty. This is why we ask for a clearer system of enforcement of the rules. This is very important for the development of AI because, to date, in the EU it is not clear what can and cannot be used for training AI systems. Precisely because of this uncertainty, some companies have decided not to launch some services in Europe, with consequences for users and businesses. We have an important partnership with Luxottica on smart glasses, we are disappointed because we did not launch the AI component in Europe due to the lack of regulatory clarity.
Yet, open-source allows you to download the code and potentially keep your data locally. For this reason it represents a strategic choice and an opportunity for Europe because it allows us to develop applications for different verticals, specific cases and use fine tuning in the best possible way. I believe there may also be an advantage for institutions and public administrations who can use advanced open-source models to develop their own services.” Arzarello concluded his speech with a message: “we ask for certain rules, uniform application of the rules and to evaluate the impacts of rules and decisions also on competitiveness”.
The Member of the Guarantor, Agostino Ghiglia declared: “The fundamental rights and freedoms of people are at the centre, they cannot be overlooked by technologies. Nobody wants to oppose progress. I agree with Meta’s colleague on one point, the issue of regulatory hypertrophy. There are too many help desks, when you face a revolution, and they represent a new discovery of fire, you have to talk to the leaders of the revolution in few. A proposal could be that in Europe there is a European Authority which is the EPDB, large companies above a certain capitalization speak to the EPDB because I also realize that going to 27 data protection authorities is objectively a problem. Also because if they then go to the EPBB who says they are wrong, even rightly so, then everything stops. But I realize that he has to talk to us, the French, and others and it becomes a problem.” The jurist also clarified: “I also wouldn’t want hyper-regulation to become the excuse for taking everything to train AI models and also scraping public data. Returning to an old slogan “The data is mine and I manage it”, I want to be able to go back”.
The President of the EU Policy Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, Alessandro Giglio Vigna, had already expressed himself on the same topic yesterday: “Encouraging the world of digitalisation helps and facilitates especially some segments of the population, those who are less familiar and who therefore they can take advantage of it in a more direct and agile way”. The Northern League MP then added: “It will be a great revolution and it is essential that we approach it with legislation that sets limits but is also duly and strategically open of a real battle for the right to digitalisation, which is now necessary”.