8 ms·

> I'm surprised to see so little coverage of AI legislation news here tbh. Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced. B

> I'm surprised to see so little coverage of AI legislation news here tbh. Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced. But I actually believe they'll be. In the worst way possible: honest players will be punished disproportionally.

cheschire 9mo ago
Yeah it’s like that episode of schoolhouse rock about how a bill becomes a law now takes place in squid games.
- razingeden 9mo ago
  >But I wonder who that sad little scrap of 8,523 pieces of paper is?
just_once 9mo ago
What does that look like? Can you describe your worst case scenario?
- amelius 9mo ago
  Worst case? Armed officers entering your home without warrant, taking away your GPU card?
  - just_once 9mo ago
    They can do that anyway. What does that have to do with the content of the proposed law?
- jandrese 9mo ago
  Highly selective enforcement along partisan lines to suppress dissent. Government officials forcing you to prove that your post is not AI generated if they don't like it. Those same officials claiming that it is AI generated regardless of the facts on the ground to have it removed and you arrested.
  - idle_zealot 9mo ago
    If you assume the use of law will be that capricious in general, then any law at all would be considered too dangerous for fear of use as a partisan tool. Why accuse your enemies of using AI-generated content in posts? Just call them domestic terrorists for violently misleading the public via the content of their posts and send the FBI or DHS after them. A new law or lack thereof changes nothing.
padolsey 9mo ago
> Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced. Time will tell. Texas' sat on its biometric data act quite quietly then hammered meta with a $1.4B settlement 20 years after the bill's enactment. Once these laws are enacted, they lay quietly until someone has a big enough bone to pick with someone else. There are already many traumatic events occurring downstream from slapdash AI development.
- vulcan01 9mo ago
  Meta made $60B in Q4 2025. A one-time $1.4B fine, 20 years after enactment, is not "getting hammered".
  - Retric 9mo ago
    They didn’t make $60B in Q4 2025 in Texas. 1.4B was 100% profit from Texas for years, that a big fine.
    - ninalanyon 9mo ago
      Big for Texas, not for Meta.
      - Retric 9mo ago
        It’s under 5 hours of GDP for Texas. It’s a big fine, but not a huge deal for either party.
        abustamam 9mo ago
        So what's the point? If neither party is really affected by a penalty (no diacernible benefit or loss to either), then is it all just performative? Maybe I just answered my own question.
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
crimsonsupe 9mo ago
> Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced. That’s because they can’t be. People assume they’ve already figured out how AI behaves and that they can just mandate specific "proper" ways to use it. The reality is that AI companies and users are going to keep refining these tools until they're indistinguishable from human work whenever they want them to be. Even if the models still make mistakes, the idea that you can just ban AI from certain settings is a fantasy because there’s no technical way to actually guarantee enforcement. You’re essentially passing laws that only apply to people who volunteer to follow them, because once someone decides to hide their AI use, you won't be able to prove it anyway.
- songodongo 9mo ago
  And you can easily prompt your way out of the typical LLM style. “Written in the style of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”
  - capnrefsmmat 9mo ago
    No, that doesn't really work so well. A lot of the LLM style hallmarks are still present when you ask them to write in another style, so a good quantitative linguist can find them: https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/pyo0xs3k/release/2 https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/pyo0xs3k/release/2 That was with GPT4, but my own work with other LLMs show they have very distinctive styles even if you specifically prompt them with a chunk of human text to imitate. I think instruction-tuning with tasks like summarization predisposes them to certain grammatical structures, so their output is always more information-dense and formal than humans.
  - Der_Einzige 9mo ago
    This still doesn't remove all the slop. You need sampler or fine-tuning tricks for it. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061
- conartist6 9mo ago
  Indistinguishable, no. Not these tools. Without emotion, without love and hate and fear and struggle, only a pale imitation of the human voice is or will be possible.
Galanwe 9mo ago
How about a pop-up on websites, next to the tracking cookie ones, to consent reading AI generated text? I see a bright future for the internet
- raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
  Don’t give the EU any ideas
sumeno 9mo ago
Who are the honest players generating AI slop articles
- chrisjj 9mo ago
  The ones honestly labelling their articles e.g. "AI can make mistakes". Full marks to Google web search for leading the way!
cucumber3732842 9mo ago
>But I actually believe they'll be. In the worst way possible: honest players will be punished disproportionally. As with everything else BigCo with their legal team will explain to the enforcers why their "right up to the line if not over it" solution is compliant and mediumco and smallco will be the ones getting fined or being forced to waste money staying far from the line or paying a 3rd party to do what bigco's legal team does at cost.
SAI_Peregrinus 9mo ago
Or it'll end up like California cancer warnings: every news site will put the warning on, just in case, making it worthless.
- Wistar 9mo ago
  … or the sesame seed labeling law that resulted in sesame seeds being added to everything. https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc846f2a19d87b03440848f1 https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc...
  - nemo 9mo ago
    As someone who is allergic to sesame, that is insanely annoying.
    - account42 9mo ago
      I don't like the opposite any more though, i.e. commercial food being effectively limited to the lowest common denominator of allergens and other dietary as well as religious restrictions. I see that happen a lot more than this one example and it doesn't even need any laws to cause it.
  - sebastiennight 9mo ago
    Wow, it's always amazing to me how the law of unintended consequences (with capitalistic incentives acting as the Monkey's Paw) strikes everytime some well-intended new law gets passed.
- clickety_clack 9mo ago
  There just can’t be a way to discriminate on the spectrum from “we use AI to tidy up the spelling and grammar” to “we just asked ChatGPT to write a story on x”, so the disclaimer will make it look like everyone just asked ChatGPT.
  - slg 9mo ago
tedggh 9mo ago
Probably worse than that. I can totally see it being weaponized. A media company critic o a particular group or individual being scrutinized and fined. I haven’t looked at any of these laws, but I bet their language gives plenty of room for interpretation and enforcement, perhaps even if you are not generating any content with AI.
mmooss 9mo ago
The primary obstacle is discussions like this one. It will be enforced if people insist it's enforced - the power comes from the voters. If a large portion of the population - especially the informed population, represented to some extent here on HN - thinks it's hopeless then it will be. If they believe they will get together to make it succeed, it will. It's that simple: Whatever people believe is the number one determination of outcome. Why do you think so many invest so much in manipulating public opinion? Many people here love SV hackers who have done the impossible, like Musk. Could you imagine this conversation at an early SpaceX planning meeting? That was a much harder task, requiring inventing new technology and enormous sums of money. Lots of regulations are enforced and effective. Your food, drugs, highways, airplane flights, etc. are all pretty safe. Voters compelling their representatives is commonplace. It's right out of psyops to get people to despair - look at messages used by militaries targeted at opposing troops. If those opposing this bill created propaganda, it would look like the comments in this thread.
AbstractH24 9mo ago
> Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced. This I still regularly see job posting with no salary here in nyc. Never heard of any enforcement

cheschire 9mo ago

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

razingeden 9mo ago
>But I wonder who that sad little scrap of 8,523 pieces of paper is?

just_once 9mo ago

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

amelius 9mo ago
Worst case? Armed officers entering your home without warrant, taking away your GPU card?
- just_once 9mo ago
  They can do that anyway. What does that have to do with the content of the proposed law?
jandrese 9mo ago
Highly selective enforcement along partisan lines to suppress dissent. Government officials forcing you to prove that your post is not AI generated if they don't like it. Those same officials claiming that it is AI generated regardless of the facts on the ground to have it removed and you arrested.
- idle_zealot 9mo ago
  If you assume the use of law will be that capricious in general, then any law at all would be considered too dangerous for fear of use as a partisan tool. Why accuse your enemies of using AI-generated content in posts? Just call them domestic terrorists for violently misleading the public via the content of their posts and send the FBI or DHS after them. A new law or lack thereof changes nothing.

padolsey 9mo ago

> Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced. Time will tell. Texas' sat on its biometric data act quite quietly then hammered meta with a $1.4B settlement 20 years after the bill's enactment. Once these laws are enacted, they lay quietly until someone has a big enough bone to pick with someone else. There are already many traumatic events occurring downstream from slapdash AI development.

vulcan01 9mo ago
Meta made $60B in Q4 2025. A one-time $1.4B fine, 20 years after enactment, is not "getting hammered".
- Retric 9mo ago
  They didn’t make $60B in Q4 2025 in Texas. 1.4B was 100% profit from Texas for years, that a big fine.
  - ninalanyon 9mo ago
    Big for Texas, not for Meta.
    - Retric 9mo ago
      It’s under 5 hours of GDP for Texas. It’s a big fine, but not a huge deal for either party.
      - abustamam 9mo ago
        So what's the point? If neither party is really affected by a penalty (no diacernible benefit or loss to either), then is it all just performative? Maybe I just answered my own question.
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]

crimsonsupe 9mo ago

> Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced. That’s because they can’t be. People assume they’ve already figured out how AI behaves and that they can just mandate specific "proper" ways to use it. The reality is that AI companies and users are going to keep refining these tools until they're indistinguishable from human work whenever they want them to be. Even if the models still make mistakes, the idea that you can just ban AI from certain settings is a fantasy because there’s no technical way to actually guarantee enforcement. You’re essentially passing laws that only apply to people who volunteer to follow them, because once someone decides to hide their AI use, you won't be able to prove it anyway.

songodongo 9mo ago
And you can easily prompt your way out of the typical LLM style. “Written in the style of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”
- capnrefsmmat 9mo ago
  No, that doesn't really work so well. A lot of the LLM style hallmarks are still present when you ask them to write in another style, so a good quantitative linguist can find them: https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/pyo0xs3k/release/2 https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/pyo0xs3k/release/2 That was with GPT4, but my own work with other LLMs show they have very distinctive styles even if you specifically prompt them with a chunk of human text to imitate. I think instruction-tuning with tasks like summarization predisposes them to certain grammatical structures, so their output is always more information-dense and formal than humans.
- Der_Einzige 9mo ago
  This still doesn't remove all the slop. You need sampler or fine-tuning tricks for it. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061
conartist6 9mo ago
Indistinguishable, no. Not these tools. Without emotion, without love and hate and fear and struggle, only a pale imitation of the human voice is or will be possible.

Galanwe 9mo ago

How about a pop-up on websites, next to the tracking cookie ones, to consent reading AI generated text? I see a bright future for the internet

raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
Don’t give the EU any ideas

sumeno 9mo ago

Who are the honest players generating AI slop articles

chrisjj 9mo ago
The ones honestly labelling their articles e.g. "AI can make mistakes". Full marks to Google web search for leading the way!

cucumber3732842 9mo ago

>But I actually believe they'll be. In the worst way possible: honest players will be punished disproportionally. As with everything else BigCo with their legal team will explain to the enforcers why their "right up to the line if not over it" solution is compliant and mediumco and smallco will be the ones getting fined or being forced to waste money staying far from the line or paying a 3rd party to do what bigco's legal team does at cost.

SAI_Peregrinus 9mo ago

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

Wistar 9mo ago
… or the sesame seed labeling law that resulted in sesame seeds being added to everything. https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc846f2a19d87b03440848f1 https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc...
- nemo 9mo ago
  As someone who is allergic to sesame, that is insanely annoying.
  - account42 9mo ago
    I don't like the opposite any more though, i.e. commercial food being effectively limited to the lowest common denominator of allergens and other dietary as well as religious restrictions. I see that happen a lot more than this one example and it doesn't even need any laws to cause it.
- sebastiennight 9mo ago
  Wow, it's always amazing to me how the law of unintended consequences (with capitalistic incentives acting as the Monkey's Paw) strikes everytime some well-intended new law gets passed.
clickety_clack 9mo ago
There just can’t be a way to discriminate on the spectrum from “we use AI to tidy up the spelling and grammar” to “we just asked ChatGPT to write a story on x”, so the disclaimer will make it look like everyone just asked ChatGPT.
- slg 9mo ago

tedggh 9mo ago

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

mmooss 9mo ago

The primary obstacle is discussions like this one. It will be enforced if people insist it's enforced - the power comes from the voters. If a large portion of the population - especially the informed population, represented to some extent here on HN - thinks it's hopeless then it will be. If they believe they will get together to make it succeed, it will. It's that simple: Whatever people believe is the number one determination of outcome. Why do you think so many invest so much in manipulating public opinion? Many people here love SV hackers who have done the impossible, like Musk. Could you imagine this conversation at an early SpaceX planning meeting? That was a much harder task, requiring inventing new technology and enormous sums of money. Lots of regulations are enforced and effective. Your food, drugs, highways, airplane flights, etc. are all pretty safe. Voters compelling their representatives is commonplace. It's right out of psyops to get people to despair - look at messages used by militaries targeted at opposing troops. If those opposing this bill created propaganda, it would look like the comments in this thread.

AbstractH24 9mo ago

> Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced. This I still regularly see job posting with no salary here in nyc. Never heard of any enforcement