IBM applauds the EU Parliament's decision to adopt the EU AI Act, a significant milestone in establishing responsible AI regulation in the European Union. The EU AI Act provides a much-needed framework for ensuring transparency, accountability, and human oversight in developing and deploying AI technologies. While important work must be done to ensure the Act is successfully implemented, IBM believes the regulation will foster trust and confidence in AI systems while promoting innovation and competitiveness.

"I commend the EU for its leadership in passing comprehensive, smart AI legislation. The risk-based approach aligns with IBM's commitment to ethical AI practices and will contribute to building open and trustworthy AI ecosystems," said Christina Montgomery, Vice President and Chief Privacy & Trust Officer at IBM. "IBM stands ready to lend our technology and expertise - including our watsonx.governance product - to help our clients and other stakeholders comply with the EU AI Act and upcoming legislation worldwide so we can all unlock the incredible potential of responsible AI." For more information, visit watsonx.governance and ibm.com/consulting/ai-governance.

Thousands of dicussion communities on Reddit have now shut doors to public access—warning signs started to appear online over past weeks, with community leaders drumming up support for a protest against the social news site's policy changes, including a strategy to monetize access to a vast pool of user data. For example the highly popular r/hardware subreddit is now "a private community"—unregistered users are greeted with a succinct message on the front page: "This subreddit is temporarily closed in protest of Reddit killing third party apps, see /r/ModCoord and /r/Save3rdPartyApps for more information." News sites are reporting that close to a total of 3500 subreddits have joined the "blackout" effort. According to the BBC this includes "five of the 10 most popular communities on the site - r/gaming, r/aww, r/Music, r/todayilearned and r/pics - which each have memberships of more than 30 million people."

A group message was shared by a moderation collective last week: "On June 12th, many subreddits will be going dark to protest this policy. Some will return after 48 hours: others will go away permanently unless the issue is adequately addressed, since many moderators aren't able to put in the work they do with the poor tools available through the official app. This isn't something any of us do lightly: we do what we do because we love Reddit, and we truly believe this change will make it impossible to keep doing what we love." A moderator (speaking to the BBC anonymously) said that the protest will be effective due to "strength in numbers," which will presumably grab the attention of Reddit's executive team.