10 ms·

A new bill in New York would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content

PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
In 10-20 years all this AI disclaimer stuff is going to be like 'don't use wikipedia, it could lie!' Status Quo Bias is a real thing, and we are seeing those people in meltdown with the world changing around them. They think avoiding AI, putting disclaimers on it, etc... will matter. But they aren't being rational, they are being emotional. The economic value is too high to stop and the cat is out of the bag with 400B models on local computers.
- Llamamoe 9mo ago
  AI-written articles tend to be far more regurgitative, lower in value, and easier to ghostwrite with intent to manipulate the narrative. Economic value or not, AI-generated content should be labeled, and trying to pass it as human-written should be illegal, regardless of how used to AI content people do or don't become.
  - RobotToaster 9mo ago
    My theory is that AI writes the way it does because it was trained on a lot of modern (organic) journalism. So many words to say so little, just so they can put ads between every paragraph.
  - charcircuit 9mo ago
    That is low quality articles in general. Have you never seen how hundreds of news sites will regurgitate the same story of another. This was happening long before AI. High quality AI written articles will still be high value.
    - orwin 9mo ago
      Did you go on grokipedia at release? I still sometimes loose myself reading stuff on Wikipedia, I guarantee you that this can't happen on grok, so much noise between facts it's hard to enjoy.
      - charcircuit 9mo ago
        Yes I did go immediately on release. I was finally able to correct articles that have been inaccurate on Wikipedia for years.
        orwin 9mo ago
        So you noticed how poor the prose was? Really unbearable to read.
        charcircuit 9mo ago
        I found it fine to read and it handled controversial subjects much better than Wikipedia.
        orwin 9mo ago
        I don't care about that, that wasn't the point, no one truly care about that. I wanted to know if the feeling of reading meandering writing that can't go to the point when reading AI-generated content was only mine, or if other people who "wiki walk" a lot did the same on Grokipedia (basically spend hours clicking on links and reading random pages). I didn't manage to do it because the writing was too "bad" for me (and i was taken by wiki walk on wookiepedia once, so my tolerance is high). I just wanted to know if it was shared. Did you wiki walk on grokipedia, or do you just use it for "controversial subjects"?
        charcircuit 9mo ago
        I don't know what wiki walk is. I don't often use grokipedia since I can just prompt an LLM directly, which may in turn extract information from grokipedia.
- simion314 9mo ago
  Emotional my ass, just have websites and social media give me a filter to hide AI stuff , I can't enjoy a video , post or story anymore since I always doubt it is real, if I am part of a minority this filter should not hit the budget of companies and would encourage real people generated content if we are larger then a dozen people.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  I don't think that's true. The 'this battle is already over' attitude is the most defeatist strategy possible. It's effectively complying in advance, rolling over before you've attempted to create the best possible outcome. With that attitude we would not have voting, human rights (for what they're worth these days), unions, a prohibition on slavery and tons of other things we take for granted every day. I'm sure AI has its place but to see it assume the guise of human output without any kind of differentiating factor has so many downsides that it is worth trying to curb the excesses. And news articles in particular should be free from hallucinations because they in turn will cause others to pass those on. Obviously with the quality of some publications you could argue that that is an improvement but it wasn't always so and a free and capable press is a precious thing.
  - mikkupikku 9mo ago
    > With that attitude we would not have voting, human rights (for what they're worth these days), unions, a prohibition on slavery and tons of other things we take for granted every day. None of these things were rolling back a technology. History shows that technology is a ratchet, the only way to get rid of a technology is social collapse or surplanting the technology with something even more useful or at the very least approximately as useful but safer. Once a technology has proliferated, it's a fiat accompli. You can regulate the technology but turning the clock back isn't going to happen.
    - jacquesm 9mo ago
      We have plenty of examples of regulated technology. And usually the general public does not have a direct stake in the outcome (ok, maybe broadcast spectrum regulation should be mentioned there), but this time they do and given what's at stake it may well be worth trying to define what a good set of possible outcomes would be and how to get there. As I mentioned above and which TFA is all about, the press for instance could be held to a standard that they have shown they can easily meet in the past.
      - mikkupikku 9mo ago
- wiseowise 9mo ago
  > But they aren't being rational, they are being emotional. When your mind is so fried on slop that you start to write like one. > The economic value is too high to stop and the cat is out of the bag with 400B models on local computers. Look at all this value created like *checks notes* scam ads, apps that undress women and teenage girls, tech bros jerking each other off on twitter, flooding open source with tsunami of low quality slop, inflating chip prices, thousands are cut off in cost savings and dozens more. Cat is out of the bag for sure.
  - mikkupikku 9mo ago
    You may not like it, but this is what peak economic performance looks like.
    - blibble 9mo ago
      no, this is what massive subsidy looks like
- duskdozer 9mo ago
  Current AI use is heavily subsidized; we will see how much value there actually is when it comes time to monetize.
- bigstrat2003 9mo ago
  > In 10-20 years all this AI disclaimer stuff is going to be like 'don't use wikipedia, it could lie!' My dude, Wikipedia is still problematic as a source of information. That isn't the ridiculous comparison you intended it to be.
Llamamoe 9mo ago
Ideally, trying to pass anything AI-generated as human-made content would be illegal, not just news, but it's a good start.
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  Fully agreed.
- xnorswap 9mo ago
  That could do more harm than good. Like how California's bylaw about cancer warnings are useless because it makes it look like everything is known to the state of California to cause cancer, which in turn makes people just ignore and tune-out the warnings because they're not actually delivering signal-to-noise. This in turn harms people when they think, "How bad can tobacco be? Even my Aloe Vera plant has a warning label". Keep it to generated news articles, and people might pay more attention to them. Don't let the AI lobby insist on anything that's touched an LLM getting labelled, because if it gets slapped on anything that's even passed through a spell-checker or saved in Notepad ( somehow this is contaminated, lol ), then it'll become a useless warning.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    Imagine selling a product with the tagline: "Unlike Pepsi, ours doesn't cause cancer."
    - groovy2shoes 9mo ago
      "Good prices, no rats! That's the Fairsley Difference™!"
  - SkyBelow 9mo ago
    It is worse, even less than useless. With the California case, there is very little go gain by lying and not putting a sticker on items that should have one. With AI generated content, as the models get to the point we can't tell anymore if it is fake, there are plenty of reasons to pass off a fake as real, and conditioning people to expect an AI warning will make them more likely to fall for content that ignores this law and doesn't label itself.
rasjani 9mo ago
Finnish public broadcasting company YLE has same rule. Even if they do cleanups of still images, they need to mark that article has AI generated content.
- hellojesus 9mo ago
  Do they find that fewer people read articles that were written by humans but have that label slapped on for the photo vs a baseline? If not: I suspect fewer people may care and so what's the point of the label? If so: why would they continue to use Ai solely to clean up photos?
ddtaylor 9mo ago
Oregon kind of already has this they just don't enforce their laws.
- mothballed 9mo ago
  Oregon and New York both are still trying to work their way up the 'rule of law' pyramid past the base level of stopping fetnanyl and meth heads from robbing convenience stores and parked cars. Every moment spent on enforcing AI disclaimers instead is an affront to the populace.
  - ddtaylor 9mo ago
    I'm well aware. I left Oregon 3 weeks ago and live in DC. Junkies spit on your wife and children while the police watch and say "not enough spit landed" and refuse to arrest anyone. When your property is stolen they will look at you like you're crazy for wanting it investigated or recovered. It has a tracker in it and the device says it's in that pile of stolen stuff near those tweakers. Good riddance Oregon!
    - Der_Einzige 9mo ago
      Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. Oregonians have more personal freedom than almost any other state. Ron Wyden is by far the best sitting senator. It's a remarkably pro-gun state for being so left wing. Just use your tech bro money and live in a suburb. Cheapest weed in America. legalish shrooms. It's harder here than almost anywhere else for cops to fk your life up. Good. Also it's objectively very low on violent crime, and the problems you talk about are in every PNW city, i.e. SF, Portland, Vancouver (WA), Vancouver (BC), Seattle. They're also the places where all the innovation, including AI (despite the non SF cities hatred for it), is happening.
      - ddtaylor 9mo ago
        That personal freedom comes at a cost to the safety of your family. Property crime rates skyrocketed. Most stores have to have locked port access. Go walk around Salem or Portland and access some public places. It's not safe to do so and anyone can verify that in seconds. I have actually a much better understanding now in DC of how people can actually be compassionate. What Oregon is doing is not compassion, it's actively causing harm and destroying thirty thousand lives as we speak right now and climbing. Those are real people dying on your sidewalks in front of you. Someone else's daughter or son. The environment has been distorted and the problem is bigger now than the appetite for compassion. I hope you stay safe.
wateralien 9mo ago
They need to enforce this with very large fines.
TheAceOfHearts 9mo ago
I'm worried that this will lead to a Prop 65 [0] situation, where eventually everything gets flagged as having used AI in some form. Unless it suddenly becomes a premium feature to have 100% human written articles, but are people really going to pay for that? > substantially composed, authored, or created through the use of generative artificial intelligence The lawyers are gonna have a field day with this one. This wording makes it seem like you could do light editing and proof-reading without disclosing that you used AI to help with that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65
- tokioyoyo 9mo ago
  At least it would be possible to autofilter everything out. Maybe market will somehow make it possible for non-AI content to get some spotlight because of that.
- em500 9mo ago
  > I'm worried that this will lead to a Prop 65 [0] situation, where eventually everything gets flagged as having used AI in some form. This is very predictably what's going to happen, and it will be just as useless as Prop 65 or the EU cookie laws or any other mandatory disclaimers.
  - layer8 9mo ago
    The EU ePrivacy directive isn’t about disclaimers.
    - consp 9mo ago
      The problem is people believe it is. People believe the advertisement industry narrative they are force to show the insane screens and have to make it difficult. Yet they are not, and a reject all must be as easy as accept all (and "legitimate reasons" do not exist, they are either allowed uses and you don't have to ask or they are not).
      - 9mo ago
asah 9mo ago
We've seen this movie - see California prop 65 warnings on literally every building. It also doesn't work to penalize fraudulent warnings - they simply include a harmless bit of AI to remain in compliance.
- NitpickLawyer 9mo ago
  > It also doesn't work to penalize fraudulent warnings How would you classify fraudulent warnings? "Hey chatgpt, does this text look good to you? LGTM. Ship it".
- kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
  The smell of Harbor Freight stores from before prop 65 compared to now indicates that it did work.
VMG 9mo ago
Step 2: outlets slap this disclaimer on all content, regardless of AI usage, making it useless Step 3: regulator prohibits putting label on content that is not AI generated Step 4: outlets make sure to use AI for all content Let's call it the "Sesame effect"
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  Or Step 1: those outlets that actually do the work see an increase in subscribers.
- orwin 9mo ago
  Alternative timeline Step 2.5: 'unlike those news outlets, all our work is verified by humans' Step 3: work as intended.
- NicuCalcea 9mo ago
  This would be an improvement in my book. I'm a data journalist, and I use AI in some of my work (data processing, classification, OCR, etc.). I always disclose it in a "Methodology" section in the story. I wouldn't trust any reporting that didn't disclose the use of AI, and if an outlet slapped a disclaimer on their entire site, I wouldn't trust that outlet.
  - terminalshort 9mo ago
    So every time a reporter researches something and does a Google search and Gemini results pop up now AI use has to be added to the methodology section and basically 100% of all articles have the "AI use" label attached.
    - shimman 9mo ago
      Yes because it would tell me immediately that the reporter can be safely ignored.
    - NicuCalcea 9mo ago
      If they use the information from the AI summary without checking, then definitely, they'd be a rubbish reporter.
charcircuit 9mo ago
So literally every article will be labeled as AI assisted and it will be meaningless. >The use of generative artificial intelligence systems shall not result in: (i) discharge, displacement or loss of position Being able to fire employees is a great use of AI and should not be restricted. > or (ii) transfer of existing duties and functions previously performed by employees or worker Is this saying you can't replace an employee's responsibilities with AI? No wonder the article says it is getting union support.
- vincnetas 9mo ago
  objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
- nosianu 9mo ago
  > So literally every article will be labeled as AI assisted and it will be meaningless. The web novel website RoyalRoad has two different tags that stories can/should add: AI-Assisted and AI-Generated. Their policy: https://www.royalroad.com/blog/57/royal-road-ai-text-policy https://www.royalroad.com/blog/57/royal-road-ai-text-policy > In this policy, we are going to separate the use of AI for text, into 3 categories: General Assistive Technologies, AI-Assisted, AI-Generated The first category does not require tagging the story, only the other two do. > The new tags are as such: > AI-Assisted: The author has used an AI tool for editing or proofreading. The story thus reflects the author’s creativity and structure, but it may use the AI’s voice and tone. There may be some negligible amount of snippets generated by AI. > AI-Generated: The story was generated using an AI tool; the author prompted and directed the process, and edited the result.
- nicoburns 9mo ago
  > So literally every article will be labeled as AI assisted and it will be meaningless. That at might at least offer an opportunity for a news source to compete on not being AI-generated. I would personally be willing to pay for information sources that exclude AI-generated content.
- westmeal 9mo ago
  How would you feel if an AI hallucinated and fired you from your job?
padolsey 9mo ago
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.
- vasco 9mo ago
  ~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 9mo ago
    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.
    - vasco 9mo ago
      I agree with that the most. That's why I added the bit about humans. In the end if what you're writing is not sourced properly or too biased it shouldn't matter if AI is involved or not. The truth is more the thing that matters with news.
nomercy400 9mo ago
You might as well place it next to the © 2026, on the bottom every page.
nh43215rgb 9mo ago
Federal level would be the best, but this is a start.
bill_joy_fanboy 9mo ago
LOL! As if human-generated news content is any more honest or accurate...
cmiles8 9mo ago
This is a good idea. Although most AI written content is also stroll pretty obvious. It consistently has a certain feel that just seems off.
- sidrag22 9mo ago
  Maybe for articles... and people who seem to think copy pasting a basic gpt response to generate a linkedin lunatic style post is passing anyone familiar with AI generated responses sniff tests... But i wouldn't be surprised to see a massive % of comments that I don't instantly attribute to AI, actually being AI. RP prompts are just so powerful, and even my local mediocore model coulda wrote 100 comments in the time its taking me to write this one. all humans are pattern seeking to a fault, the amount of people even in this community that will not consider something AI generated just because it doesnt have emdashes or emojis is probably pretty high.
- chrisjj 9mo ago
  > Although most AI written content is also stroll pretty obvious. It consistently has a certain feel that just seems off. I think you're saying "AI" written content having a certain feel that just seems off is obviously "AI" written content. Yes. But you've know way of knowing that's most. There could be 10x more that we don't detect.
delichon 9mo ago
> In addition, the bill contains language that requires news organizations to create safeguards that protect confidential material — mainly, information about sources — from being accessed by AI technologies. So clawdbot may become a legal risk in New York, even if it doesn't generate copy. And you can't use AI to help evaluate which data AI is forbidden to see, so you can't use AI over unknown content. This little side-proposal could drastically limit the scope of AI usefulness over all, especially as the idea of data forbidden to AI tech expands to other confidential material.
- InsideOutSanta 9mo ago
  This seems like common sense. I'm running OpenClaw with GLM-4.6V as an experiment. I'm allowing my friends to talk to it using WhatsApp. Even though it has been instructed to maintain privacy between people who talk to it, it constantly divulges information from private chats, gets confused about who is talking to it, and so on.^ Of course, a stronger model would be less likely to screw up, but this is an intrinsic issue with LLMs that can't be fully solved. Reporters absolutely should not run an instance of OpenClaw and provide it with information about sources. ^: Just to be clear, the people talking to it understand that they cannot divulge any actual private information to it.
seydor 9mo ago
That's the equivalent of having a disclaimer "This article was written using MS Word". Utterly useless in this day and age
rektlessness 9mo ago
Broad, ambiguous language like 'substantially composed by AI' will trigger overcompliance rendering disclosures meaningless, but maybe that was the plan.
RobotToaster 9mo ago
I can see this ending up like prop65 warnings. Every website will have in the footer "this website may contain content known to the state of New York to be AI generated"
- Ir0nMan 9mo ago
  Let's make this a thing if the law passes.
bluebxrry 9mo ago
How about instead of calling Claude a clanker again, which he can't control, how about we give everyone a fair shot this time with a bill that requires the news to not suck in the first place.
TuringNYC 9mo ago
What happens if I use linear regression on a chart? Where does one draw the line on "AI"?
- cardanome 9mo ago
  Obviously people mean LLMs these days when talking about AI. Don't be obtuse.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
chrisjj 9mo ago
Why limit this to news? Equally deserving of protection is e.g. opinion.
NietTim 9mo ago
New York also wants 3d printers to know when they are printing gun parts. Sure these initiatives have good meanings but also would only work when "the good ones" chose to label their content as AI generated/gun parts. There will _never_ be a 100% sure fire, non invasive, way to know if an article was (in part) AI generated or not, the same way that "2d printers" (lol) refuse to photo copy fiat currency, to circle back to the 3d printer argument. IMO: it's already too late and effort should instead be focussed on recognition of this and quickly moving on to prevention through education instead of trying to smother it with legislation, it is just not going away.
kgwxd 9mo ago
AI Generated or News? You can't have both.
dweekly 9mo ago
I've begun an AI content disclosure working group at W3C if folks are interested in helping to craft a standard that allows websites to voluntarily disclose the degree to which AI was involved in creating all or part of the page. That would enable publishers to be compliant with this law as well as the EU AI Act's Article 50. https://www.w3.org/community/ai-content-disclosure/ https://www.w3.org/community/ai-content-disclosure/ https://github.com/dweekly/ai-content-disclosure https://github.com/dweekly/ai-content-disclosure
- staticautomatic 9mo ago
  How does one get involved?
  - dweekly 9mo ago
    Yay, I'd love to have your help! 1) Anyone can join the W3C group; you don't need to be a formal member of W3C! 2) What's dumb about the proposal itself? How could it better achieve its goals? 3) You can see some dialogue at https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/261 https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/261 - what resonates and doesn't in the feedback and critique?
jfengel 9mo ago
What I'd really like to see is a label on original reporting. Even beyond AI, the vast majority of news is re-packaging information you got from somewhere else. AI can replace the re-writers, but not the original journalists, people who spoke to primary sources (or who were themselves eyewitnesses). Any factual document should reference its sources. If not, it should be treated skeptically, regardless of whether AI or a human is doing that. An article isn't automatically valueless just because it's synthesized. It can focus and contextualize, regardless of whether it's human or AI written. But it should at the very least be able to say "This is the actual fact of the matter", with a link to it. (And if AI has hallucinated the link, that's a huge red flag.)
- stahorn 9mo ago
  Just like we want to know where the food we eat comes from, we want to know where the information comes from. Of course there's the limit of journalists having to keep their sources secret in many cases. But original publisher I think should be possible.
- foxbarrington 9mo ago
  A common reaction I get to https://forty.news https://forty.news is that the stories “need sources” which I always find funny. I don’t hear the same demand of sources from every other news outlet (I find it extra weird because all FN’s stories are 40 years old, simple to verify, and can’t push an agenda the same way). Totally agree with you: all newspapers should cite sources. What’s silly to me is how selectively people care—big outlets get to hand-wave the “trust me” part even when a piece is basically a lightly rewritten press release, thinly sourced, or reflecting someone’s incentives more than reality.
  - Spivak 9mo ago
    Well yeah because investigative journalism and original reporting outside of the spectacle of buying a plane ticket to a warzone or weather disaster to the reporter can have a dramatic background is too expensive when people come to you in droves with literally pre-written articles you can rubber stamp and publish. Which by the way if you ever want to get in the paper that's how, it's super easy. AI will help you learn how to write in the right tone/voice for news if you don't know how.
talkingtab 9mo ago
I'm beginning to suspect HN also needs such a bill. Maybe it is not AI content, but so many prominent posts on HN feel like advertising. Perhaps that is the good thing about AI is that it decreases the trust level. Or is that really a good thing? [Edit: spelling sigh]
ameliaquining 9mo ago
I'm not convinced that this law, if it passed, would survive a court challenge on First Amendment grounds. U.S. constitutional law generally doesn't look kindly on attempts to regulate journalism.
- saghm 9mo ago
  OTOH any challenge that makes it all the way to the Supreme Court right now has as much chance of being a decision that completely ignores constitutional law as it does being decided based on that.
jaredklewis 9mo ago
This is so dumb. Name literally any problem caused by AI generated content (there are dozens to choose from) and I will explain why this law will make absolutely no impact on that issue. Now articles from organizations with legitimate journalists and fact checkers like the NYT, WSJ, or the economist will need an “AI generated” badge because they used an AI assistant and they have risk adverse legal departments. This will be gleefully pointed out by every brain dead Twitter conspiracy theorist, Breitbart columnist, 911 truther substack writer, and Russian spam bot as they happily spew unbadged drivel out into the world. Thanks so much New York! AI doesn’t make bad news content. Complete disregard for objective reality does. I’ll take an ai assisted human that actually cares about truth over an unassisted partisan hooligan every time. If this is the best our legislatures can come up with we are so utterly fucked…
kaicianflone 9mo ago
This feels like a symptom of a deeper issue: we’re treating AI outputs as if they’re authoritative when they’re really just single, unaccountable generations. Disclaimers help, but they don’t fix the decision process that produced the content in the first place. One approach we’ve been exploring is turning high-stakes AI outputs (like news summaries or classifications) into consensus jobs: multiple independent agents submit or vote under explicit policies, with incentives and accountability, and the system resolves the result before anything is published. The goal isn’t “AI is right,” but “this outcome was reached under clear rules and can be audited.” That kind of structure seems more scalable than adding disclaimers after the fact. We’re experimenting with this idea on an open source CLI at https://consensus.tools https://consensus.tools if anyone’s interested in the underlying mechanics.
- CodingJeebus 9mo ago
  I agree with the sentiment of this, but it makes one major assumption that I don't think will pass muster in the long run: that people generating output care enough themselves to do it "the right way". Many don't and never will. Low-effort content mills will never, ever care enough to generate more accurate, consensus-based output, especially if it adds complexity and cost to their workflows. > That kind of structure seems more scalable than adding disclaimers after the fact. Not if your goal as a business is to churn out slop as fast and cheaply as possible, and a whole lot of online content is like that. A disclaimer is warranted because you cannot force everyone to use the kinds of approaches that you're talking about. A ton of people who either don't know or don't care what they're putting out will inevitably exist.
ericzawo 9mo ago
Good.
neilv 9mo ago
> Any news content created using generative AI must also be reviewed by a human employee “with editorial control” before publication. To emphasize this: it's important that the organization assume responsibility, just as they would with traditional human-generated 'content'. What we don't want is for these disclaimers to be used like the disclaimers of tech companies deploying AI: to try to weasel out of responsibility. "Oh no, it's 'AI', who could have ever foreseen the possibility that it would make stuff up, and lie about it confidently, with terrible effects. Aw, shucks: AI, what can ya do. We only designed and deployed this system, and are totally innocent of any behavior of the system." Also don't turn this into a compliance theatre game, like we have with information security. "We paid for these compliance products, and got our certifications, and have our processes, so who ever could have thought we'd be compromised." (Other than anyone who knows anything about these systems, and knows that the stacks and implementation and processes are mostly a load of performative poo, chosen by people who really don't care about security.) Hold the news orgs responsible for 'AI' use. The first time a news report wrongly defames someone, or gets someone killed, a good lawsuit should wipe out all their savings on staffing.
- raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - hashstring 9mo ago
    I, and I believe many others, do hold him responsible for it. However, I do not think starting there is a good idea: your progress in other areas would stall until that crook has been dealt with.
    - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
      Like I’ve said a few times on HN, if you have 10 friends and ask them what they want to eat for dinner and 6 say “let’s go to a Mexican restaurants” and the other four say “let’s kill Bob and eat him”, it still tells you a lot about your friend group. It tells you even more of the person advocating eating Bob is made the leader of your group and decides where you are going to eat dinner for the next four years. Especially after you have already seen what your friend has already done for four years
nilslindemann 9mo ago
I support this for the same reason I want scripted reality TV shows to be labeled as such. Anything that claims to be reality but isn't should be clearly marked as such, unless it's obvious from the context.
python999 9mo ago
How about disclaimers on AI-generated legislation?
hsuduebc2 9mo ago
I don’t know whether it’s ignorance of the subject or a sense of exceptionalism, but it’s striking that politicians who write this kind of legislation don’t spend even five minutes checking whether such a law is actually enforceable. I would genuinely like to see how they plan to enforce this in practice. At best, it seems like it could only work through reports and multiple witness statements.
whycombinetor 9mo ago
As a person who wants to consume LESS human slop in my news feeds, this seems like exactly the wrong direction.

In 10-20 years all this AI disclaimer stuff is going to be like 'don't use wikipedia, it could lie!' Status Quo Bias is a real thing, and we are seeing those people in meltdown with the world changing around them. They think avoiding AI, putting disclaimers on it, etc... will matter. But they aren't being rational, they are being emotional. The economic value is too high to stop and the cat is out of the bag with 400B models on local computers.

Llamamoe 9mo ago
AI-written articles tend to be far more regurgitative, lower in value, and easier to ghostwrite with intent to manipulate the narrative. Economic value or not, AI-generated content should be labeled, and trying to pass it as human-written should be illegal, regardless of how used to AI content people do or don't become.
- RobotToaster 9mo ago
  My theory is that AI writes the way it does because it was trained on a lot of modern (organic) journalism. So many words to say so little, just so they can put ads between every paragraph.
- charcircuit 9mo ago
  That is low quality articles in general. Have you never seen how hundreds of news sites will regurgitate the same story of another. This was happening long before AI. High quality AI written articles will still be high value.
  - orwin 9mo ago
    Did you go on grokipedia at release? I still sometimes loose myself reading stuff on Wikipedia, I guarantee you that this can't happen on grok, so much noise between facts it's hard to enjoy.
    - charcircuit 9mo ago
      Yes I did go immediately on release. I was finally able to correct articles that have been inaccurate on Wikipedia for years.
      - orwin 9mo ago
        So you noticed how poor the prose was? Really unbearable to read.
        charcircuit 9mo ago
        I found it fine to read and it handled controversial subjects much better than Wikipedia.
        orwin 9mo ago
        I don't care about that, that wasn't the point, no one truly care about that. I wanted to know if the feeling of reading meandering writing that can't go to the point when reading AI-generated content was only mine, or if other people who "wiki walk" a lot did the same on Grokipedia (basically spend hours clicking on links and reading random pages). I didn't manage to do it because the writing was too "bad" for me (and i was taken by wiki walk on wookiepedia once, so my tolerance is high). I just wanted to know if it was shared. Did you wiki walk on grokipedia, or do you just use it for "controversial subjects"?
        charcircuit 9mo ago
        I don't know what wiki walk is. I don't often use grokipedia since I can just prompt an LLM directly, which may in turn extract information from grokipedia.
simion314 9mo ago
Emotional my ass, just have websites and social media give me a filter to hide AI stuff , I can't enjoy a video , post or story anymore since I always doubt it is real, if I am part of a minority this filter should not hit the budget of companies and would encourage real people generated content if we are larger then a dozen people.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 9mo ago
I don't think that's true. The 'this battle is already over' attitude is the most defeatist strategy possible. It's effectively complying in advance, rolling over before you've attempted to create the best possible outcome. With that attitude we would not have voting, human rights (for what they're worth these days), unions, a prohibition on slavery and tons of other things we take for granted every day. I'm sure AI has its place but to see it assume the guise of human output without any kind of differentiating factor has so many downsides that it is worth trying to curb the excesses. And news articles in particular should be free from hallucinations because they in turn will cause others to pass those on. Obviously with the quality of some publications you could argue that that is an improvement but it wasn't always so and a free and capable press is a precious thing.
- mikkupikku 9mo ago
  > With that attitude we would not have voting, human rights (for what they're worth these days), unions, a prohibition on slavery and tons of other things we take for granted every day. None of these things were rolling back a technology. History shows that technology is a ratchet, the only way to get rid of a technology is social collapse or surplanting the technology with something even more useful or at the very least approximately as useful but safer. Once a technology has proliferated, it's a fiat accompli. You can regulate the technology but turning the clock back isn't going to happen.
  - jacquesm 9mo ago
    We have plenty of examples of regulated technology. And usually the general public does not have a direct stake in the outcome (ok, maybe broadcast spectrum regulation should be mentioned there), but this time they do and given what's at stake it may well be worth trying to define what a good set of possible outcomes would be and how to get there. As I mentioned above and which TFA is all about, the press for instance could be held to a standard that they have shown they can easily meet in the past.
    - mikkupikku 9mo ago
wiseowise 9mo ago
> But they aren't being rational, they are being emotional. When your mind is so fried on slop that you start to write like one. > The economic value is too high to stop and the cat is out of the bag with 400B models on local computers. Look at all this value created like *checks notes* scam ads, apps that undress women and teenage girls, tech bros jerking each other off on twitter, flooding open source with tsunami of low quality slop, inflating chip prices, thousands are cut off in cost savings and dozens more. Cat is out of the bag for sure.
- mikkupikku 9mo ago
  You may not like it, but this is what peak economic performance looks like.
  - blibble 9mo ago
    no, this is what massive subsidy looks like
duskdozer 9mo ago
Current AI use is heavily subsidized; we will see how much value there actually is when it comes time to monetize.
bigstrat2003 9mo ago
> In 10-20 years all this AI disclaimer stuff is going to be like 'don't use wikipedia, it could lie!' My dude, Wikipedia is still problematic as a source of information. That isn't the ridiculous comparison you intended it to be.

Llamamoe 9mo ago

Ideally, trying to pass anything AI-generated as human-made content would be illegal, not just news, but it's a good start.

jacquesm 9mo ago
Fully agreed.
xnorswap 9mo ago
That could do more harm than good. Like how California's bylaw about cancer warnings are useless because it makes it look like everything is known to the state of California to cause cancer, which in turn makes people just ignore and tune-out the warnings because they're not actually delivering signal-to-noise. This in turn harms people when they think, "How bad can tobacco be? Even my Aloe Vera plant has a warning label". Keep it to generated news articles, and people might pay more attention to them. Don't let the AI lobby insist on anything that's touched an LLM getting labelled, because if it gets slapped on anything that's even passed through a spell-checker or saved in Notepad ( somehow this is contaminated, lol ), then it'll become a useless warning.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  Imagine selling a product with the tagline: "Unlike Pepsi, ours doesn't cause cancer."
  - groovy2shoes 9mo ago
    "Good prices, no rats! That's the Fairsley Difference™!"
- SkyBelow 9mo ago
  It is worse, even less than useless. With the California case, there is very little go gain by lying and not putting a sticker on items that should have one. With AI generated content, as the models get to the point we can't tell anymore if it is fake, there are plenty of reasons to pass off a fake as real, and conditioning people to expect an AI warning will make them more likely to fall for content that ignores this law and doesn't label itself.

rasjani 9mo ago

Finnish public broadcasting company YLE has same rule. Even if they do cleanups of still images, they need to mark that article has AI generated content.

hellojesus 9mo ago
Do they find that fewer people read articles that were written by humans but have that label slapped on for the photo vs a baseline? If not: I suspect fewer people may care and so what's the point of the label? If so: why would they continue to use Ai solely to clean up photos?

ddtaylor 9mo ago

Oregon kind of already has this they just don't enforce their laws.

mothballed 9mo ago
Oregon and New York both are still trying to work their way up the 'rule of law' pyramid past the base level of stopping fetnanyl and meth heads from robbing convenience stores and parked cars. Every moment spent on enforcing AI disclaimers instead is an affront to the populace.
- ddtaylor 9mo ago
  I'm well aware. I left Oregon 3 weeks ago and live in DC. Junkies spit on your wife and children while the police watch and say "not enough spit landed" and refuse to arrest anyone. When your property is stolen they will look at you like you're crazy for wanting it investigated or recovered. It has a tracker in it and the device says it's in that pile of stolen stuff near those tweakers. Good riddance Oregon!
  - Der_Einzige 9mo ago
    Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. Oregonians have more personal freedom than almost any other state. Ron Wyden is by far the best sitting senator. It's a remarkably pro-gun state for being so left wing. Just use your tech bro money and live in a suburb. Cheapest weed in America. legalish shrooms. It's harder here than almost anywhere else for cops to fk your life up. Good. Also it's objectively very low on violent crime, and the problems you talk about are in every PNW city, i.e. SF, Portland, Vancouver (WA), Vancouver (BC), Seattle. They're also the places where all the innovation, including AI (despite the non SF cities hatred for it), is happening.
    - ddtaylor 9mo ago
      That personal freedom comes at a cost to the safety of your family. Property crime rates skyrocketed. Most stores have to have locked port access. Go walk around Salem or Portland and access some public places. It's not safe to do so and anyone can verify that in seconds. I have actually a much better understanding now in DC of how people can actually be compassionate. What Oregon is doing is not compassion, it's actively causing harm and destroying thirty thousand lives as we speak right now and climbing. Those are real people dying on your sidewalks in front of you. Someone else's daughter or son. The environment has been distorted and the problem is bigger now than the appetite for compassion. I hope you stay safe.

wateralien 9mo ago

They need to enforce this with very large fines.

TheAceOfHearts 9mo ago

I'm worried that this will lead to a Prop 65 [0] situation, where eventually everything gets flagged as having used AI in some form. Unless it suddenly becomes a premium feature to have 100% human written articles, but are people really going to pay for that? > substantially composed, authored, or created through the use of generative artificial intelligence The lawyers are gonna have a field day with this one. This wording makes it seem like you could do light editing and proof-reading without disclosing that you used AI to help with that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65

tokioyoyo 9mo ago
At least it would be possible to autofilter everything out. Maybe market will somehow make it possible for non-AI content to get some spotlight because of that.
em500 9mo ago
> I'm worried that this will lead to a Prop 65 [0] situation, where eventually everything gets flagged as having used AI in some form. This is very predictably what's going to happen, and it will be just as useless as Prop 65 or the EU cookie laws or any other mandatory disclaimers.
- layer8 9mo ago
  The EU ePrivacy directive isn’t about disclaimers.
  - consp 9mo ago
    The problem is people believe it is. People believe the advertisement industry narrative they are force to show the insane screens and have to make it difficult. Yet they are not, and a reject all must be as easy as accept all (and "legitimate reasons" do not exist, they are either allowed uses and you don't have to ask or they are not).
    - 9mo ago

asah 9mo ago

We've seen this movie - see California prop 65 warnings on literally every building. It also doesn't work to penalize fraudulent warnings - they simply include a harmless bit of AI to remain in compliance.

NitpickLawyer 9mo ago
> It also doesn't work to penalize fraudulent warnings How would you classify fraudulent warnings? "Hey chatgpt, does this text look good to you? LGTM. Ship it".
kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
The smell of Harbor Freight stores from before prop 65 compared to now indicates that it did work.

VMG 9mo ago

Step 2: outlets slap this disclaimer on all content, regardless of AI usage, making it useless Step 3: regulator prohibits putting label on content that is not AI generated Step 4: outlets make sure to use AI for all content Let's call it the "Sesame effect"

jacquesm 9mo ago
Or Step 1: those outlets that actually do the work see an increase in subscribers.
orwin 9mo ago
Alternative timeline Step 2.5: 'unlike those news outlets, all our work is verified by humans' Step 3: work as intended.
NicuCalcea 9mo ago
This would be an improvement in my book. I'm a data journalist, and I use AI in some of my work (data processing, classification, OCR, etc.). I always disclose it in a "Methodology" section in the story. I wouldn't trust any reporting that didn't disclose the use of AI, and if an outlet slapped a disclaimer on their entire site, I wouldn't trust that outlet.
- terminalshort 9mo ago
  So every time a reporter researches something and does a Google search and Gemini results pop up now AI use has to be added to the methodology section and basically 100% of all articles have the "AI use" label attached.
  - shimman 9mo ago
    Yes because it would tell me immediately that the reporter can be safely ignored.
  - NicuCalcea 9mo ago
    If they use the information from the AI summary without checking, then definitely, they'd be a rubbish reporter.

charcircuit 9mo ago

So literally every article will be labeled as AI assisted and it will be meaningless. >The use of generative artificial intelligence systems shall not result in: (i) discharge, displacement or loss of position Being able to fire employees is a great use of AI and should not be restricted. > or (ii) transfer of existing duties and functions previously performed by employees or worker Is this saying you can't replace an employee's responsibilities with AI? No wonder the article says it is getting union support.

vincnetas 9mo ago
objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
nosianu 9mo ago
> So literally every article will be labeled as AI assisted and it will be meaningless. The web novel website RoyalRoad has two different tags that stories can/should add: AI-Assisted and AI-Generated. Their policy: https://www.royalroad.com/blog/57/royal-road-ai-text-policy https://www.royalroad.com/blog/57/royal-road-ai-text-policy > In this policy, we are going to separate the use of AI for text, into 3 categories: General Assistive Technologies, AI-Assisted, AI-Generated The first category does not require tagging the story, only the other two do. > The new tags are as such: > AI-Assisted: The author has used an AI tool for editing or proofreading. The story thus reflects the author’s creativity and structure, but it may use the AI’s voice and tone. There may be some negligible amount of snippets generated by AI. > AI-Generated: The story was generated using an AI tool; the author prompted and directed the process, and edited the result.
nicoburns 9mo ago
> So literally every article will be labeled as AI assisted and it will be meaningless. That at might at least offer an opportunity for a news source to compete on not being AI-generated. I would personally be willing to pay for information sources that exclude AI-generated content.
westmeal 9mo ago
How would you feel if an AI hallucinated and fired you from your job?

padolsey 9mo ago

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.

vasco 9mo ago
~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 9mo ago
  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.
  - vasco 9mo ago
    I agree with that the most. That's why I added the bit about humans. In the end if what you're writing is not sourced properly or too biased it shouldn't matter if AI is involved or not. The truth is more the thing that matters with news.

nomercy400 9mo ago

nh43215rgb 9mo ago

Federal level would be the best, but this is a start.

bill_joy_fanboy 9mo ago

LOL! As if human-generated news content is any more honest or accurate...

cmiles8 9mo ago

This is a good idea. Although most AI written content is also stroll pretty obvious. It consistently has a certain feel that just seems off.

sidrag22 9mo ago
Maybe for articles... and people who seem to think copy pasting a basic gpt response to generate a linkedin lunatic style post is passing anyone familiar with AI generated responses sniff tests... But i wouldn't be surprised to see a massive % of comments that I don't instantly attribute to AI, actually being AI. RP prompts are just so powerful, and even my local mediocore model coulda wrote 100 comments in the time its taking me to write this one. all humans are pattern seeking to a fault, the amount of people even in this community that will not consider something AI generated just because it doesnt have emdashes or emojis is probably pretty high.
chrisjj 9mo ago
> Although most AI written content is also stroll pretty obvious. It consistently has a certain feel that just seems off. I think you're saying "AI" written content having a certain feel that just seems off is obviously "AI" written content. Yes. But you've know way of knowing that's most. There could be 10x more that we don't detect.

delichon 9mo ago

> In addition, the bill contains language that requires news organizations to create safeguards that protect confidential material — mainly, information about sources — from being accessed by AI technologies. So clawdbot may become a legal risk in New York, even if it doesn't generate copy. And you can't use AI to help evaluate which data AI is forbidden to see, so you can't use AI over unknown content. This little side-proposal could drastically limit the scope of AI usefulness over all, especially as the idea of data forbidden to AI tech expands to other confidential material.

InsideOutSanta 9mo ago
This seems like common sense. I'm running OpenClaw with GLM-4.6V as an experiment. I'm allowing my friends to talk to it using WhatsApp. Even though it has been instructed to maintain privacy between people who talk to it, it constantly divulges information from private chats, gets confused about who is talking to it, and so on.^ Of course, a stronger model would be less likely to screw up, but this is an intrinsic issue with LLMs that can't be fully solved. Reporters absolutely should not run an instance of OpenClaw and provide it with information about sources. ^: Just to be clear, the people talking to it understand that they cannot divulge any actual private information to it.

seydor 9mo ago

That's the equivalent of having a disclaimer "This article was written using MS Word". Utterly useless in this day and age

rektlessness 9mo ago

Broad, ambiguous language like 'substantially composed by AI' will trigger overcompliance rendering disclosures meaningless, but maybe that was the plan.

RobotToaster 9mo ago

I can see this ending up like prop65 warnings. Every website will have in the footer "this website may contain content known to the state of New York to be AI generated"

Ir0nMan 9mo ago
Let's make this a thing if the law passes.

bluebxrry 9mo ago

How about instead of calling Claude a clanker again, which he can't control, how about we give everyone a fair shot this time with a bill that requires the news to not suck in the first place.

TuringNYC 9mo ago

What happens if I use linear regression on a chart? Where does one draw the line on "AI"?

cardanome 9mo ago
Obviously people mean LLMs these days when talking about AI. Don't be obtuse.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

chrisjj 9mo ago

Why limit this to news? Equally deserving of protection is e.g. opinion.

NietTim 9mo ago

New York also wants 3d printers to know when they are printing gun parts. Sure these initiatives have good meanings but also would only work when "the good ones" chose to label their content as AI generated/gun parts. There will _never_ be a 100% sure fire, non invasive, way to know if an article was (in part) AI generated or not, the same way that "2d printers" (lol) refuse to photo copy fiat currency, to circle back to the 3d printer argument. IMO: it's already too late and effort should instead be focussed on recognition of this and quickly moving on to prevention through education instead of trying to smother it with legislation, it is just not going away.

kgwxd 9mo ago

AI Generated or News? You can't have both.

dweekly 9mo ago

I've begun an AI content disclosure working group at W3C if folks are interested in helping to craft a standard that allows websites to voluntarily disclose the degree to which AI was involved in creating all or part of the page. That would enable publishers to be compliant with this law as well as the EU AI Act's Article 50. https://www.w3.org/community/ai-content-disclosure/ https://www.w3.org/community/ai-content-disclosure/ https://github.com/dweekly/ai-content-disclosure https://github.com/dweekly/ai-content-disclosure

staticautomatic 9mo ago
How does one get involved?
- dweekly 9mo ago
  Yay, I'd love to have your help! 1) Anyone can join the W3C group; you don't need to be a formal member of W3C! 2) What's dumb about the proposal itself? How could it better achieve its goals? 3) You can see some dialogue at https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/261 https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/261 - what resonates and doesn't in the feedback and critique?

jfengel 9mo ago

What I'd really like to see is a label on original reporting. Even beyond AI, the vast majority of news is re-packaging information you got from somewhere else. AI can replace the re-writers, but not the original journalists, people who spoke to primary sources (or who were themselves eyewitnesses). Any factual document should reference its sources. If not, it should be treated skeptically, regardless of whether AI or a human is doing that. An article isn't automatically valueless just because it's synthesized. It can focus and contextualize, regardless of whether it's human or AI written. But it should at the very least be able to say "This is the actual fact of the matter", with a link to it. (And if AI has hallucinated the link, that's a huge red flag.)

stahorn 9mo ago
Just like we want to know where the food we eat comes from, we want to know where the information comes from. Of course there's the limit of journalists having to keep their sources secret in many cases. But original publisher I think should be possible.
foxbarrington 9mo ago
A common reaction I get to https://forty.news https://forty.news is that the stories “need sources” which I always find funny. I don’t hear the same demand of sources from every other news outlet (I find it extra weird because all FN’s stories are 40 years old, simple to verify, and can’t push an agenda the same way). Totally agree with you: all newspapers should cite sources. What’s silly to me is how selectively people care—big outlets get to hand-wave the “trust me” part even when a piece is basically a lightly rewritten press release, thinly sourced, or reflecting someone’s incentives more than reality.
- Spivak 9mo ago
  Well yeah because investigative journalism and original reporting outside of the spectacle of buying a plane ticket to a warzone or weather disaster to the reporter can have a dramatic background is too expensive when people come to you in droves with literally pre-written articles you can rubber stamp and publish. Which by the way if you ever want to get in the paper that's how, it's super easy. AI will help you learn how to write in the right tone/voice for news if you don't know how.

talkingtab 9mo ago

I'm beginning to suspect HN also needs such a bill. Maybe it is not AI content, but so many prominent posts on HN feel like advertising. Perhaps that is the good thing about AI is that it decreases the trust level. Or is that really a good thing? [Edit: spelling sigh]

ameliaquining 9mo ago

I'm not convinced that this law, if it passed, would survive a court challenge on First Amendment grounds. U.S. constitutional law generally doesn't look kindly on attempts to regulate journalism.

saghm 9mo ago
OTOH any challenge that makes it all the way to the Supreme Court right now has as much chance of being a decision that completely ignores constitutional law as it does being decided based on that.

jaredklewis 9mo ago

This is so dumb. Name literally any problem caused by AI generated content (there are dozens to choose from) and I will explain why this law will make absolutely no impact on that issue. Now articles from organizations with legitimate journalists and fact checkers like the NYT, WSJ, or the economist will need an “AI generated” badge because they used an AI assistant and they have risk adverse legal departments. This will be gleefully pointed out by every brain dead Twitter conspiracy theorist, Breitbart columnist, 911 truther substack writer, and Russian spam bot as they happily spew unbadged drivel out into the world. Thanks so much New York! AI doesn’t make bad news content. Complete disregard for objective reality does. I’ll take an ai assisted human that actually cares about truth over an unassisted partisan hooligan every time. If this is the best our legislatures can come up with we are so utterly fucked…

kaicianflone 9mo ago

This feels like a symptom of a deeper issue: we’re treating AI outputs as if they’re authoritative when they’re really just single, unaccountable generations. Disclaimers help, but they don’t fix the decision process that produced the content in the first place. One approach we’ve been exploring is turning high-stakes AI outputs (like news summaries or classifications) into consensus jobs: multiple independent agents submit or vote under explicit policies, with incentives and accountability, and the system resolves the result before anything is published. The goal isn’t “AI is right,” but “this outcome was reached under clear rules and can be audited.” That kind of structure seems more scalable than adding disclaimers after the fact. We’re experimenting with this idea on an open source CLI at https://consensus.tools https://consensus.tools if anyone’s interested in the underlying mechanics.

CodingJeebus 9mo ago
I agree with the sentiment of this, but it makes one major assumption that I don't think will pass muster in the long run: that people generating output care enough themselves to do it "the right way". Many don't and never will. Low-effort content mills will never, ever care enough to generate more accurate, consensus-based output, especially if it adds complexity and cost to their workflows. > That kind of structure seems more scalable than adding disclaimers after the fact. Not if your goal as a business is to churn out slop as fast and cheaply as possible, and a whole lot of online content is like that. A disclaimer is warranted because you cannot force everyone to use the kinds of approaches that you're talking about. A ton of people who either don't know or don't care what they're putting out will inevitably exist.

ericzawo 9mo ago

Good.

neilv 9mo ago

> Any news content created using generative AI must also be reviewed by a human employee “with editorial control” before publication. To emphasize this: it's important that the organization assume responsibility, just as they would with traditional human-generated 'content'. What we don't want is for these disclaimers to be used like the disclaimers of tech companies deploying AI: to try to weasel out of responsibility. "Oh no, it's 'AI', who could have ever foreseen the possibility that it would make stuff up, and lie about it confidently, with terrible effects. Aw, shucks: AI, what can ya do. We only designed and deployed this system, and are totally innocent of any behavior of the system." Also don't turn this into a compliance theatre game, like we have with information security. "We paid for these compliance products, and got our certifications, and have our processes, so who ever could have thought we'd be compromised." (Other than anyone who knows anything about these systems, and knows that the stacks and implementation and processes are mostly a load of performative poo, chosen by people who really don't care about security.) Hold the news orgs responsible for 'AI' use. The first time a news report wrongly defames someone, or gets someone killed, a good lawsuit should wipe out all their savings on staffing.

raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
[flagged]
- hashstring 9mo ago
  I, and I believe many others, do hold him responsible for it. However, I do not think starting there is a good idea: your progress in other areas would stall until that crook has been dealt with.
  - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
    Like I’ve said a few times on HN, if you have 10 friends and ask them what they want to eat for dinner and 6 say “let’s go to a Mexican restaurants” and the other four say “let’s kill Bob and eat him”, it still tells you a lot about your friend group. It tells you even more of the person advocating eating Bob is made the leader of your group and decides where you are going to eat dinner for the next four years. Especially after you have already seen what your friend has already done for four years

nilslindemann 9mo ago

I support this for the same reason I want scripted reality TV shows to be labeled as such. Anything that claims to be reality but isn't should be clearly marked as such, unless it's obvious from the context.

python999 9mo ago

How about disclaimers on AI-generated legislation?

hsuduebc2 9mo ago

I don’t know whether it’s ignorance of the subject or a sense of exceptionalism, but it’s striking that politicians who write this kind of legislation don’t spend even five minutes checking whether such a law is actually enforceable. I would genuinely like to see how they plan to enforce this in practice. At best, it seems like it could only work through reports and multiple witness statements.

whycombinetor 9mo ago

As a person who wants to consume LESS human slop in my news feeds, this seems like exactly the wrong direction.