4 ms·

Proposal: AI Content Disclosure Header

74 points by exprez135 1y ago

rossant 1y ago
Interesting initiative but I wonder if the mode provides sufficient granularity. For example, what about an original human-generated text that is entirely translated by an AI?
- dijksterhuis 1y ago
  > what about an original human-generated text that is entirely translated by an AI? probably ai-modified -- the core content was first created by humans, then modified (translated into another language). translating back would hopefully return you the original human generated content (or at least something as close as possible to the original). | class | author | modifier/reviewer | | ----------------- | ------ | ----------------- | | none | human | human/none | | ai-modified | human | ai | <--* | ai-originated | ai | human | | machine-generated | ai | ai/none |
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  It certainly doesn't cover the case of mixed-origin content. Say for example, a dialog between a human and AI or even mixed-model content. For those, my instinct is to fallback to markup which would seem to work quite well. There is the pesky issue of AI content in non-markup formats - think JSON that don't have the same orthogonal flexibility in annotating metadata.
shortrounddev2 1y ago
Years ago people were arguing that fashion magazines should have to disclose if they photoshopped pictures of women to make them look skinnier. France implemented this law, and I believe other countries have as well. I believe that we should have similar laws for AI generated content.
xhkkffbf 1y ago
I'm all for some kind of disclosure, but where do we draw the line. I use a pretty smart grammar and spell checker, one that's got more "AI" in it to analyze the sentence structure. Is that AI content?
- stillpointlab 1y ago
  According to the spec, yes a grammar checker would be subject to disclosure: > ai-modified Indicates AI was used to assist with or modify content primarily created by humans. The source material was not AI-generated. Examples include AI-based grammar checking, style suggestions, or generating highlights or summaries of human-written text.
AKSF_Ackermann 1y ago
It feels like a header is the wrong tool for this, even if you hypothetically would want to disclose that, would you expect a blog cms to offer the feature? Or a web browser to surface it?
throwaway13337 1y ago
Can we have a disclosure for sponsored content header instead? I'd love to browse without that. It does not bother me that someone used a tool to help them write if the content is not meant to manipulate me. Let's solve the actual problem.
- handfuloflight 1y ago
  We already have those legally mandated disclosures per the FTC.
ugh123 1y ago
Hoping I don't need to click on something, or have something obstructing my view.
- odie5533 1y ago
  The cookie banner just got 200px taller.
grumbel 1y ago
Completely the wrong way around. We are heading into a future where everything will be touched by AI in some way, be it things like Photoshop Generative Fill, spell check, subtitles, face filters, upscaling, translation or just good old algorithmic recommendations. Even many smartphones already run AI over every photo they make. Doing it in a HTTP header is furthermore extremely lossly, files get copy around and that header ain't coming with them. It's not a practical place to put that info, especially when we have Exif inside the images themselves. The proper way to handle this is mark authentic content and keeping a trail of how it was edited, since that's the rare thing you might to highlight in a sea of slop, https://contentauthenticity.org/ https://contentauthenticity.org/ is trying to do that.
- politelemon 1y ago
  The authors do seem to be conflating AI as a marketing term with chat gpt types. AI encompasses a broad suite of technologies including the spell check you've mentioned and given them number of tools used today that would technically constitute AI, this header makes no sense.
- TYPE_FASTER 1y ago
  Yup, this is the way. Assume everything is AI unless proven otherwise.
GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
Maybe an ignorant question but at the dictionary level, how would one indicate that multiple providers/models went into the resulting work (based on the example given)? Is there a standard for nested lists?
vntok 1y ago
This feels like the Security Flag proposal (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt)
- gruez 1y ago
  or end up like california prop 65 warnings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65
layer8 1y ago
Why only for HTTP? This would be appropriate for MIME multipart/mixed part headers as well. ;) Maybe better define an RDF vocabulary for that instead, so that individual DIVs and IMGs can be correctly annotated in HTML. ;)
xgulfie 1y ago
This is like asking the fox to announce itself before entering the henhouse
patrickhogan1 1y ago
The bigger challenge here is that we already struggle with basic metadata integrity. Sites routinely manipulate creation dates for SEO - I regularly see 5-year-old content timestamped as "published yesterday" to game Google's freshness signals. While this doesn't invalidate the proposal, it does suggest we'd see similar abuse patterns emerge, once this header becomes a ranking factor.
- paulddraper 1y ago
  Does that work? There’s no way… Most web servers use mtime for Last-Modified header. It would be crazy for Google to treat that as authorship date, and I cannot believe that they do.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > It would be crazy for Google to treat that as authorship date, and I cannot believe that they do. I'm not sure what Google uses for authorship date, but if you do date-range based web searches, the actual dates of the content no longer have any meaningful relationship to what was set in the earch criteria (news seems mostly better but with some problems, but actual web search is hopeless). In both directions -- searching for recent stuff gets plenty of very old stuff mixed in, but searching for stuff from a period well in the past gets lots of stuff from yesterday, too.
  - patrickhogan1 1y ago
    On platforms like Wordpress these headers are settable via SEO plugins. Many sites will roll these headers forward.
weddpros 1y ago
Maybe we should avoid training AI with AI-generated content: that's a use case I would defend. Still I believe MIME would be the right place to say something about the Media, rather than the Transport protocol. On a lighter note: we should consider second order consequences. The EU commission will demand its own EU-AI-Disclosure header be send to EU citizens, and will require consent from the user before showing him AI generated stuff. UK will require age validation before showing AI stuff to protect the children's brains. France will use the header to compute a new tax on AI generated content, due by all online platform who want to show AI generated content to french citizens. That's a Pandora box I wouldn't even talk about, much less open...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- blibble 1y ago
  > Maybe we should avoid training AI with AI-generated content: that's a use case I would defend. if this takes off I'll: - tag my actual content (so they won't train on it) - not tag my infinite spider web of automatically generated slop output (so it'll poison the models) win win!
  - ronsor 1y ago
    then they'll start ignoring the header and it'll be useless (of course, it was never going to be useful)
- ronsor 1y ago
  > The EU commission will demand its own EU-AI-Disclosure header be send to EU citizens, and will require consent from the user before showing him AI generated stuff. UK will require age validation before showing AI stuff to protect the children's brains. France will use the header to compute a new tax on AI generated content, due by all online platform who want to show AI generated content to french citizens. I think the recent drama related to the UK's Online Safety Act has shown that people are getting sick of country-specific laws simply for serving content. The most likely outcome is sites either block those regions or ignore the laws, realizing there is no practical enforcement avenue.
woah 1y ago
Seems like someone just trying to get their name on a published IETF standard for the bragging/resume rights
judge123 1y ago
I'm genuinely torn. On one hand, transparency is good. But on the other, I can totally see this header becoming a lazy filter for platforms to just automatically demote or even block any AI-assisted content. What happens to artists using AI tools, or writers using it for brainstorming?
- xgulfie 1y ago
  They can adapt or get left behind
  - paulddraper 1y ago
    Ha
ivape 1y ago
This is a Gentlemen’s agreement humans will not keep. Not how our species works.
nrmitchi 1y ago
This seems like a (potential) solution looking for a nail-shaped problem. Yes, there is a huge problem with AI content flooding the field, and being able to identify/exclude it would be nice (for a variety of purposes) However, the issue isn't that content was "AI generated"; as long as the content is correct, and is what the user was looking for, they don't really care. The issue is content that was generated en-masse, is largely not correct/trustworthy, and serves only to to game SEO/clicks/screentime/etc. A system where the content you are actually trying to avoid has to opt in is doomed for failure. Is the purpose/expectation here that search/cdn companies attempt to classify, and identify, "AI content"?
- yahoozoo 1y ago
  It says in the first paragraph it’s for crawlers and bots. How many humans are inspecting the headers of every page they casually browse? An immediate problem that could potentially be addressed by this is the “AI training on AI content” loop.
  - nikolayasdf123 1y ago
    I believe this is why Google did SynthID https://deepmind.google/science/synthid/ https://deepmind.google/science/synthid/
  - TrueDuality 1y ago
    How many of the makers of these trash SEO sites are going to voluntarily identify their content as AI generated?
    - TheRoque 1y ago
      Moreover, I find it ironic that website owners will gracefully give AI companies the power to identify what is "good" data and what is not. I mean, why would I do the work for them and identify my data as AI, so that they would ignore it ? "yes please, take all my work, this is quality content, train on it, it's free !" that's what it sounds like
  - 1y ago
userbinator 1y ago
Approximately as useless as "do not track".
webprofusion 1y ago
Hack: only present this header to AI crawlers, so they don't index your content, lol.

74 points by exprez135 1y ago

Interesting initiative but I wonder if the mode provides sufficient granularity. For example, what about an original human-generated text that is entirely translated by an AI?

dijksterhuis 1y ago
> what about an original human-generated text that is entirely translated by an AI? probably ai-modified -- the core content was first created by humans, then modified (translated into another language). translating back would hopefully return you the original human generated content (or at least something as close as possible to the original). | class | author | modifier/reviewer | | ----------------- | ------ | ----------------- | | none | human | human/none | | ai-modified | human | ai | <--* | ai-originated | ai | human | | machine-generated | ai | ai/none |
kelseyfrog 1y ago
It certainly doesn't cover the case of mixed-origin content. Say for example, a dialog between a human and AI or even mixed-model content. For those, my instinct is to fallback to markup which would seem to work quite well. There is the pesky issue of AI content in non-markup formats - think JSON that don't have the same orthogonal flexibility in annotating metadata.

shortrounddev2 1y ago

Years ago people were arguing that fashion magazines should have to disclose if they photoshopped pictures of women to make them look skinnier. France implemented this law, and I believe other countries have as well. I believe that we should have similar laws for AI generated content.

xhkkffbf 1y ago

I'm all for some kind of disclosure, but where do we draw the line. I use a pretty smart grammar and spell checker, one that's got more "AI" in it to analyze the sentence structure. Is that AI content?

stillpointlab 1y ago
According to the spec, yes a grammar checker would be subject to disclosure: > ai-modified Indicates AI was used to assist with or modify content primarily created by humans. The source material was not AI-generated. Examples include AI-based grammar checking, style suggestions, or generating highlights or summaries of human-written text.

AKSF_Ackermann 1y ago

It feels like a header is the wrong tool for this, even if you hypothetically would want to disclose that, would you expect a blog cms to offer the feature? Or a web browser to surface it?

throwaway13337 1y ago

Can we have a disclosure for sponsored content header instead? I'd love to browse without that. It does not bother me that someone used a tool to help them write if the content is not meant to manipulate me. Let's solve the actual problem.

handfuloflight 1y ago
We already have those legally mandated disclosures per the FTC.

ugh123 1y ago

Hoping I don't need to click on something, or have something obstructing my view.

odie5533 1y ago
The cookie banner just got 200px taller.

grumbel 1y ago

Completely the wrong way around. We are heading into a future where everything will be touched by AI in some way, be it things like Photoshop Generative Fill, spell check, subtitles, face filters, upscaling, translation or just good old algorithmic recommendations. Even many smartphones already run AI over every photo they make. Doing it in a HTTP header is furthermore extremely lossly, files get copy around and that header ain't coming with them. It's not a practical place to put that info, especially when we have Exif inside the images themselves. The proper way to handle this is mark authentic content and keeping a trail of how it was edited, since that's the rare thing you might to highlight in a sea of slop, https://contentauthenticity.org/ https://contentauthenticity.org/ is trying to do that.

politelemon 1y ago
The authors do seem to be conflating AI as a marketing term with chat gpt types. AI encompasses a broad suite of technologies including the spell check you've mentioned and given them number of tools used today that would technically constitute AI, this header makes no sense.
TYPE_FASTER 1y ago
Yup, this is the way. Assume everything is AI unless proven otherwise.

GuinansEyebrows 1y ago

Maybe an ignorant question but at the dictionary level, how would one indicate that multiple providers/models went into the resulting work (based on the example given)? Is there a standard for nested lists?

vntok 1y ago

This feels like the Security Flag proposal (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt)

gruez 1y ago
or end up like california prop 65 warnings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65

layer8 1y ago

Why only for HTTP? This would be appropriate for MIME multipart/mixed part headers as well. ;) Maybe better define an RDF vocabulary for that instead, so that individual DIVs and IMGs can be correctly annotated in HTML. ;)

xgulfie 1y ago

This is like asking the fox to announce itself before entering the henhouse

patrickhogan1 1y ago

The bigger challenge here is that we already struggle with basic metadata integrity. Sites routinely manipulate creation dates for SEO - I regularly see 5-year-old content timestamped as "published yesterday" to game Google's freshness signals. While this doesn't invalidate the proposal, it does suggest we'd see similar abuse patterns emerge, once this header becomes a ranking factor.

paulddraper 1y ago
Does that work? There’s no way… Most web servers use mtime for Last-Modified header. It would be crazy for Google to treat that as authorship date, and I cannot believe that they do.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > It would be crazy for Google to treat that as authorship date, and I cannot believe that they do. I'm not sure what Google uses for authorship date, but if you do date-range based web searches, the actual dates of the content no longer have any meaningful relationship to what was set in the earch criteria (news seems mostly better but with some problems, but actual web search is hopeless). In both directions -- searching for recent stuff gets plenty of very old stuff mixed in, but searching for stuff from a period well in the past gets lots of stuff from yesterday, too.
- patrickhogan1 1y ago
  On platforms like Wordpress these headers are settable via SEO plugins. Many sites will roll these headers forward.

weddpros 1y ago

Maybe we should avoid training AI with AI-generated content: that's a use case I would defend. Still I believe MIME would be the right place to say something about the Media, rather than the Transport protocol. On a lighter note: we should consider second order consequences. The EU commission will demand its own EU-AI-Disclosure header be send to EU citizens, and will require consent from the user before showing him AI generated stuff. UK will require age validation before showing AI stuff to protect the children's brains. France will use the header to compute a new tax on AI generated content, due by all online platform who want to show AI generated content to french citizens. That's a Pandora box I wouldn't even talk about, much less open...

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
blibble 1y ago
> Maybe we should avoid training AI with AI-generated content: that's a use case I would defend. if this takes off I'll: - tag my actual content (so they won't train on it) - not tag my infinite spider web of automatically generated slop output (so it'll poison the models) win win!
- ronsor 1y ago
  then they'll start ignoring the header and it'll be useless (of course, it was never going to be useful)
ronsor 1y ago
> The EU commission will demand its own EU-AI-Disclosure header be send to EU citizens, and will require consent from the user before showing him AI generated stuff. UK will require age validation before showing AI stuff to protect the children's brains. France will use the header to compute a new tax on AI generated content, due by all online platform who want to show AI generated content to french citizens. I think the recent drama related to the UK's Online Safety Act has shown that people are getting sick of country-specific laws simply for serving content. The most likely outcome is sites either block those regions or ignore the laws, realizing there is no practical enforcement avenue.

woah 1y ago

Seems like someone just trying to get their name on a published IETF standard for the bragging/resume rights

judge123 1y ago

I'm genuinely torn. On one hand, transparency is good. But on the other, I can totally see this header becoming a lazy filter for platforms to just automatically demote or even block any AI-assisted content. What happens to artists using AI tools, or writers using it for brainstorming?

xgulfie 1y ago
They can adapt or get left behind
- paulddraper 1y ago
  Ha

ivape 1y ago

This is a Gentlemen’s agreement humans will not keep. Not how our species works.

nrmitchi 1y ago

This seems like a (potential) solution looking for a nail-shaped problem. Yes, there is a huge problem with AI content flooding the field, and being able to identify/exclude it would be nice (for a variety of purposes) However, the issue isn't that content was "AI generated"; as long as the content is correct, and is what the user was looking for, they don't really care. The issue is content that was generated en-masse, is largely not correct/trustworthy, and serves only to to game SEO/clicks/screentime/etc. A system where the content you are actually trying to avoid has to opt in is doomed for failure. Is the purpose/expectation here that search/cdn companies attempt to classify, and identify, "AI content"?

yahoozoo 1y ago
It says in the first paragraph it’s for crawlers and bots. How many humans are inspecting the headers of every page they casually browse? An immediate problem that could potentially be addressed by this is the “AI training on AI content” loop.
- nikolayasdf123 1y ago
  I believe this is why Google did SynthID https://deepmind.google/science/synthid/ https://deepmind.google/science/synthid/
- TrueDuality 1y ago
  How many of the makers of these trash SEO sites are going to voluntarily identify their content as AI generated?
  - TheRoque 1y ago
    Moreover, I find it ironic that website owners will gracefully give AI companies the power to identify what is "good" data and what is not. I mean, why would I do the work for them and identify my data as AI, so that they would ignore it ? "yes please, take all my work, this is quality content, train on it, it's free !" that's what it sounds like
- 1y ago

userbinator 1y ago

Approximately as useless as "do not track".

webprofusion 1y ago

Hack: only present this header to AI crawlers, so they don't index your content, lol.