Issue 2262 - Monday 3 February, 2025

In Today’s Issue

The News

Unacceptably risky AI is now banned in Europe

Using AI to scrape facial data from the internet, predict whether someone is a criminal based on their appearance, or engage in other “unacceptably risky” practices is now banned in the EU with the passing of the first deadline of its relatively new AI Act (TechCrunch). While the US is going let-’er-rip, the EU is fascinating counterfactual with its expansive, risk-based AI regulation that requires AI makers to report and mitigate risks on their AI products, depending on how risky it is (here’s the EU’s easy-to-read summary if you want to know more). Obviously, AI makers don’t love it, although the penalties for breaking the law — like fines of up to 7% of their annual revenue — can’t be handed out until later this year. Meanwhile how’s AI policy in Australia? Well, as pointed out by InnovationAus’ James Riley, the federal government has a “plan for a National AI Capability Plan” (here’s the media release) that will start to advise government on this stuff in … December 2025 (InnovationAus, $). No rush, guys!

Open source’s sanction headache

Folks, the official position of the Sizzle on open source is: hell yeah, brother. So I was interested to read how open source developers are impacted by government sanctions (The New Stack). Last week, the Linux Foundation put out its guide to dealing with US sanctions (Linux Foundation) which penalise people for working with listed people, organisations and countries and work on strict liability i.e. you’re in trouble whether you knew about it or not. This obviously presents a problem for developers who may be breaking sanctions if their project has contributors who’ve been designated/blocked, like when the Russian Linux maintainers who were kicked out last year (ZDNet). Also, Sam Altman says he wants to make OpenAI open again (TechCrunch) although I did hear the argument that the company — while not dropping open weight models like DeepSeek —  has been more open than the computers working on transformer models before. (This argument was made on the most recent episode of a good tech podcast Sharp Tech hosted by excellent tech analyst Stratechery’s Ben Thompson).

Teach your kids not to make AI porn

You should tell your kids to not use AI to create child sexual exploitation material of others, Australian police say (Information Age). This, err, might seem weak and obvious but I actually think it’s probably a good reminder to parents, many who might not know this is a problem. The Australian Federal Police made the warning off the back of its Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation seeing more cases of students use AI-generated sexual deepfake software. Personally, I’d like to see police focus their efforts on cracking down on the people and groups who are making money and who make it possible to make money from non-consensual explicit deepfakes. Relatedly, the UK is criminalising the AI tools “designed to create child sexual abuse material” (BBC). Good.

Oh, Also

What was your first computer room like?

This popped up on Slashdot and I thought it’s super cute:

I remember my first computer room was in the centre of my primary school, next to the administration office. It had carpet the same colour as Windows 95’s default background. It was always freezing cold and had four long desks stuffed with desktop computers. While the teacher was at the front, the screens were arranged so they faced to the side of the classroom which meant only the first few rows’ screens could be used. Naturally, we took advantage of that and played Minesweeper, extremely basic online flash games and even Typequick. We definitely learned a lot, but not necessarily what we were supposed to be learning.

Do you remember yours?

Bargains

The End

😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson and emailed every weekday afternoon. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius.

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.