4 ms·
A decade ago, when chat bots were a lot less useful, a common piece of etiquette was that it's fine for a bot to pretend to be a human or God or whatever, but i
by wongarsu 2y ago
A decade ago, when chat bots were a lot less useful, a common piece of etiquette was that it's fine for a bot to pretend to be a human or God or whatever, but if you directly ask it if it's a bot it has to confirm that. Basically of the bot version of that myth about undercover cops.
I don't see a downside in requiring public-facing bots to do that
Not sure if that's what the proposal is about though, it's currently down
- nico 2y agoArchive links on another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42968477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42968477
- scarab92 2y ago[flagged]
- coliveira 2y agoI think this is a just law for any bot that interacts with humans. It doesn't make sense for a person to treat a bot as another human.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago>It’s akin to requiring manufacturers to disclose whether a product is hand made or whether machines were used to reduce the need for humans to do repetitive manual labour. Let's go off this lens... why is this bad? >The bots that are used to help humans achieve nefarious goals will simply continue to pretend to be human. Good. Now I can catch them, report them, and CA can fine them. Again, I don't see the downside. I like good, helpful bots. Them being bots don't make them less helpful (on the contrary. It's nice knowing they can be available 24/7).
- pishpash 2y agoBut the discrimination angle is interesting. What if a law required everyone to be "transparent" and respond truthfully to "are you [some race]"?
- thfuran 2y agoI don't really see the analogy, unless you're arguing that chatgpt deserves human rights.
- yellowapple 2y agoAt some point AIs will be smart enough that they might very well deserve human rights. That point's probably sooner than any of us expect.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoBut a bot isn't a human. It doesn't have any rights nor even indirect rights like animals do. It's a tool and I don't see anything wrong with tools being clear about what they are. And I especially do not like beokg tricked by a non-human pretending to be human.
- scarab92 2y agoDiscriminate just means differentiate. The parent comment isn't talking about race, they are talking about discriminating between human and human tool (bot).
- boomlinde 2y agoI don't understand your angle at all. How would disclosing that it's a bot make a bot less helpful or less of a useful tool, except to deceive for someone else's gain?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- conradev 2y agoI feel like “using automation to make manufacturing more efficient” and “using automation to respond to customer support” are very different things
- BobbyTables2 2y agoUp close they look very diff rent. A bit farther away both end up being the same — “using automation to make executives insanely rich”.
- acdha 2y ago> It’s deaccelerationist, and that’s a bad thing This sounds like a religious position, not something which will lead to positive conversation. I would consider whether your personal biases are causing you to interpret this as an attack and miss some perspective: for example, if these are useful tools would it really lead to discrimination? If they’re actually better tools, I’d think “bot” would have a positive connotation just as most people jumped to using the web instead of calling businesses on the phone. I think a better comparison would be product labeling and disclosure laws, where there are very few examples where reducing the information available to consumers leads to better outcomes. People don’t care about whether something is made by hand or machine anywhere near as much as they care about the quality of the final product. The reason people care about talking to bots is that they’re often used to worsen service and people do not want to waste their time on a bot which cannot help them. This seems entirely fair.
- dade_ 2y agoImpersonating humans is creepy, unnecessary and a bad business practice that creates negative customer experiences that are likely to result in a hostile response. This law is only necessary because of incompetent management making decisions for short term profit at the expense of reputation and long term growth.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tdb7893 2y agoSo firstly the idea that context shouldn't affect people's views on things (like whether a good is handmade or not) just doesn't match up with how people actually interact with and perceive the world. I mean obviously I'll feel different about my copy of Calvin and Hobbs I read as a child versus a random copy in a store. I would even go as far to say that as a human it's impossible to fully separate objects from their perceived context. For bots specifically, many bots try to pass themselves off as human because the people that created them know that that lie matters. There's room for debate about what's the best specific policy but the mere fact that bots so often try to pass themselves off as human is their creators admitting that it's important.
- buttercraft 2y agoTransparency that allows consumers to make their own, informed decisions is "discrimination against useful tools"? What the fuck am I even reading?
- scarab92 2y ago[flagged]
- johnnyanmac 2y agoHow is it luiddite-ism to not lie? The core issue here isn't even about tech. It's about transparency.
- scarab92 2y agoBecause they aren't lieing, they are simply not disclosing whether their actions are the result on an organic neural network or a silicon one. Society almost never differentiates between goods and services produced directly by human hands, versus with the aid of tools.
- card_zero 2y agoOK, welcome to the new situation where we have a reason to.
- slg 2y ago>Society almost never differentiates between goods and services produced directly by human hands, versus with the aid of tools. This is objectively wrong. "Handmade" is an incredibly common marketing keyword slapped on all sorts of products to imply quality.
- scarab92 2y agoThat's a completely voluntary marketing decision. There's no law requiring manufacturers to identify hand made versus machine made, and often, there aren't even clear definitions for what hand made means.
- slg 2y agoThose goalposts moved fast from "Society almost never..." to "There's no law requiring...".
- geor9e 2y agoI remember the opposite. The chat bots popular in 2015 were trying to pass the Turing Test and would deny being a bot. The 2025 chat bots popular now are pretty good about explaining they are a bot. Of course, that's just generalizing the popular ones - anyone can make their own do as they please.
- tenpies 2y agoIt bothers me that they didn't consider that this should be bilateral: a bot must confirm that it is a bot, and a human must confirm it is a human. I wouldn't want humans pretending to be bots, for a variety of reasons.
- hunter2_ 2y agoYour sentiment reminds me of this: https://www.goingconcern.com/when-ai-stands-for-actually-indians/ https://www.goingconcern.com/when-ai-stands-for-actually-ind...
- Galatians4_16 2y agoFreeze Peach says I can be a bot if I want to.
- chrisco255 2y agoSome humans pull it off very well.
- BobbyTables2 2y agoI’ve had a number of encounters with ISP tech support where the humans seemed a lot like bots…
- pishpash 2y agoAll support is basically like bots nowadays, that's why they can be replaced by bots so easily.
- scarab92 2y agoIt's all neural nets. The differences are just implementation details (i.e. whether the transistors are carbon or silicon based).
- rightbyte 2y agoI think they used to have a lot of canned responses which made them feel like bots.
- mjbale116 2y ago> I don't see a downside in requiring public-facing bots to do that Your statement attempts to give an impression of a middle ground, but what it actually does is delegating the action to the human - who has limited energy and has to make hundreds of other decisions. Your statement sounds like what a lobbyist might whisper to a regulator in an attempt to effectively neuter the bill. People not versed in technology do not - and do not have to - know what an LLM is or what it can do. These matters need be resolved at the source and we must not allow hopeful libertarian technologist DDoS the whole society.
- mixxit 2y agoah the good ol '/finger [Nick|Address]