[padolsey]

I'm surprised to see so little coverage of AI legislation news here tbh. Maybe there's an apathy and exhaustion to it. But if you're developing AI stuff, you need to keep on top of this. This is a pretty pivotal moment. NY has been busy with RAISE (frontier AI safety protocols, audits, incident reporting), S8420A (must disclose AI-generated performers in ads), GBL Article 47 (crisis detection & disclaimers for AI chatbots), S7676B (protects performers from unauthorized AI likenesses), NYC LL144 (bias audits for AI hiring tools), SAFE for Kids Act [pending] (restricts algorithmic feeds for minors). At least three of those are relevant even if your app only _serves_ people in NY. It doesn't matter where you're based. That's just one US state's laws on AI.

It's kinda funny the oft-held animosity towards EU's heavy-handed regulations when navigating US state law is a complete minefield of its own.

[raincole]

> I'm surprised to see so little coverage of AI legislation news here tbh.

Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced.

But I actually believe they'll be. In the worst way possible: honest players will be punished disproportionally.

[padolsey]

> Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced.

Time will tell. Texas' sat on its biometric data act quite quietly then hammered meta with a $1.4B settlement 20 years after the bill's enactment. Once these laws are enacted, they lay quietly until someone has a big enough bone to pick with someone else. There are already many traumatic events occurring downstream from slapdash AI development.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Or it'll end up like California cancer warnings: every news site will put the warning on, just in case, making it worthless.

[Galanwe]

How about a pop-up on websites, next to the tracking cookie ones, to consent reading AI generated text?

I see a bright future for the internet

[cheschire]

Yeah it’s like that episode of schoolhouse rock about how a bill becomes a law now takes place in squid games.

[mmooss]

The primary obstacle is discussions like this one. It will be enforced if people insist it's enforced - the power comes from the voters. If a large portion of the population - especially the informed population, represented to some extent here on HN - thinks it's hopeless then it will be. If they believe they will get together to make it succeed, it will. It's that simple: Whatever people believe is the number one determination of outcome. Why do you think so many invest so much in manipulating public opinion?

Many people here love SV hackers who have done the impossible, like Musk. Could you imagine this conversation at an early SpaceX planning meeting? That was a much harder task, requiring inventing new technology and enormous sums of money.

Lots of regulations are enforced and effective. Your food, drugs, highways, airplane flights, etc. are all pretty safe. Voters compelling their representatives is commonplace.

It's right out of psyops to get people to despair - look at messages used by militaries targeted at opposing troops. If those opposing this bill created propaganda, it would look like the comments in this thread.

[crimsonsupe]

> Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced.

That’s because they can’t be.

People assume they’ve already figured out how AI behaves and that they can just mandate specific "proper" ways to use it.

The reality is that AI companies and users are going to keep refining these tools until they're indistinguishable from human work whenever they want them to be.

Even if the models still make mistakes, the idea that you can just ban AI from certain settings is a fantasy because there’s no technical way to actually guarantee enforcement.

You’re essentially passing laws that only apply to people who volunteer to follow them, because once someone decides to hide their AI use, you won't be able to prove it anyway.

[tedggh]

Probably worse than that. I can totally see it being weaponized. A media company critic o a particular group or individual being scrutinized and fined. I haven’t looked at any of these laws, but I bet their language gives plenty of room for interpretation and enforcement, perhaps even if you are not generating any content with AI.

[AbstractH24]

> Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced.

This

I still regularly see job posting with no salary here in nyc. Never heard of any enforcement

[cucumber3732842]

>But I actually believe they'll be. In the worst way possible: honest players will be punished disproportionally.

As with everything else BigCo with their legal team will explain to the enforcers why their "right up to the line if not over it" solution is compliant and mediumco and smallco will be the ones getting fined or being forced to waste money staying far from the line or paying a 3rd party to do what bigco's legal team does at cost.

[just_once]

What does that look like? Can you describe your worst case scenario?

[sumeno]

Who are the honest players generating AI slop articles

[toofy]

> SAFE for Kids Act [pending] (restricts algorithmic feeds for minors).

i personally would love to see something like this but changed a little:

for every user (not just minors) require a toggle: upfront, not buried, always in your face toggle to turn off algorithmic feeds, where you’ll only see posts from people you follow, in the order in which they post it. again, no dark patterns, once a user toggles to a non-algorithmic feeds, it should stick.

this would do a lot to restore trust. i don’t really use the big social medias much any more, but when i did i can not tell you how many posts i missed because the algorithms are kinda dumb af. like i missed friends anniversary celebrations, events that were right up my alley, community projects, etc… because the algorithms didn’t think the posts announcing the events would be addictive enough for me.

no need to force it “for the kids” when they can just give everyone the choice.

[mbreese]

None of those bills/laws involve legislating publishing though. This bill would require a disclaimer on something published. That’s a freedom of speech issue, so it going to be tougher to enforce and keep from getting overturned in the courts. The question here are what are the limits the government can have on what a company publishes, regardless of how the content is generated.

IMO, It’s a much tougher problem (legally) than protecting actors from AI infringement on their likeness. AI services are easier to regulate.. published AI generated content, much more difficult.

The article also mentions efforts by news unions of guilds. This might be a more effective mechanism. If a person/union/guild required members to add a tagline in their content/articles, this would have a similar effect - showing what is and what is not AI content without restricting speech.

[tempodox]

> This bill would require a disclaimer on something published. That’s a freedom of speech issue

They can publish all they want, they just have to label it clearly. I don’t see how that is a free speech issue.

[HanShotFirst]

Is AI-generated text speech?

[tencentshill]

I'll bet AI is going to be simply outlawed for hiring, and possibly algorithmic hiring practices altogether. You can't audit a non-deterministic system unless you train the AI from scratch, which is an expense only the wealthiest companies can take on.

[Balinares]

Don't ding the amusingly scoped animosity, it's very convenient: we get to say stuff like "Sure, our laws may keep us at the mercy of big corps unlike these other people, BUT..." and have a ready rationalization for why our side is actually still superior when you look at it. Imagine what would happen if the populace figured it's getting collectively shafted in a way others may not.

[rubyfan]

>Imagine what would happen if the populace figured it's getting collectively shafted in a way others may not.

They already believe that and it’s used to keep us fighting each other.

[totetsu]

Ai view from Simmons+simmons is a very good newsletter on the topic of ai regulation https://www.simmons-simmons.com/en/publications/clptn86e8002...

[venkat223]

All video and other contests should have ai stamp as most of the YouTube is AI generated.Almost like memes

[dyauspitr]

I believe it’s because it will be impossible to enforce. It might have some teeth with LLMs that add watermarks to their images but otherwise you could have one human in the loop for 10,000 articles and not call it AI.

[snickerbockers]

I honestly just don't see any point in these laws because they're all predicated on the people who own the AI's acting in good faith. In a way I actually think they're a net negative because they seem to be giving a false impression that these problems have an obvious solution.

One of the most persistent and also the dumbest opinion I keep seeing both among laymen and people who really ought to know better is that we can solve the deepfake problem by mandating digital watermarks on generated content.

[vasco]

~Everything will use AI at some point. This is like requiring a disclaimer for using Javascript back when it was introduced. It's unfortunate but I think ultimately a losing battle.

Plus if you want to mandate it, hidden markers (stenography) to verify which model generated the text so people can independently verify if articles were written by humans (emitted directly by the model) is probably the only feasible way. But its not like humans are impartial anyway already when writing news so I don't even see the point of that.

[layer8]

It would make sense to have a more general law about accountability for the contents of news. If news is significantly misleading or plagiarizing, it shouldn’t matter if it is due to the use of AI or not, the human editorship should be liable in either case.

This is a concept at least in some EU countries, that there has to always be one person responsible in terms of press law for what is being published.

[jMyles]

> I'm surprised to see so little coverage of AI legislation news here tbh.

I think the reason is that most people don't believe, at least on sufficiently long times scales, that legacy states are likely to be able to shape AI (or for that matter, the internet). The legitimacy of the US state appears to be in a sort of free-fall, for example.

It takes a long time to fully (or even mostly) understand the various machinations of legislative action (let alone executive discretion, and then judicial interpretation), and in that time, regardless of what happens in various capitol buildings, the tests pass and the code runs - for better and for worse.

And even amidst a diversity of views/assessments of the future of the state, there seems to be near consensus regarding the underlying impetus: obviously humans and AI are distinct, and hearing the news from a human, particular a human with a strong web-of-trust connection in your local society, is massively more credible. What's not clear is whether states have a role to play in lending clarity to the situation, or whether that will happen of the internet's accord.