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California bill would require ‘watermarks’ to signal content created by AI
(www.sfchronicle.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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Surprise, that's completely unenforceable.
Yet more out of touch legislators working with things they can't even begin to understand.
(And I'm not shilling for fucking AI here, but let's call a spade a spade.)
What baffles me is that those lawmakers think they can just legislate any problem with law.
So okay, California requires it. None of the other states do. None of the rest of the Internet does. It doesn't fix anything.
They act like the Internet is like cable and it's all american companies that "provides" services to end users.
Whilst I agree with the other op, this point is just wrong.
Replace "california" in your argument with "European union" and the whole thing just crumbles away. State legislation absolutely has a wider effect than the state it originates in.
Inb4 AI devs just slap a generic “click this box to confirm you are not in California” verification on their shit.
If the server isn't even in California, would it even apply/be enforceable to them?
so youre saying nothing should be done? great idea
Sure, but this is less than nothing. It literally applies 0 friction against AI and is completely and totally unenforceable. AND it's a laughing stock for everyone and sucks the oxygen out of better AI regulation groups and think-tanks.
Why? If a California corporation is pumping out AI content and it doesn't have watermarks, why can't this be enforced? It's not an all use solution, but I fail to see how it fails completely.
This is actually an effective measure when you sit down to actually think about this from a policy perspective. Right now, the biggest issue with AI generated content for the corporate side is that there is no IP right in the generated content. Private enterprise generally doesn't like distributing content that it doesn't have ability to exercise complete control over. However, distributing generated content without marking it as generated reduces that risk outlay potentially enough to make the value calculus swing in favor of its use. People will just assume there are rights in the material. Now, if you force this sort of marking, that heavily alters the calculus.
Now people will say wah wah wah no way to really enforce. People will lie. Etc. But that's true for MOST of our IP laws. Nevertheless, they prove effective at accomplishing many of their intents. The majority of private businesses are not going to intentionally violate regulatory laws of they can help it and, when they do, it's more often than not because they think they've found a loophole but were wrong. And yes, that's even accounting for and understanding that there are many examples of illegal corporate activity.
They call it the California effect for a reason.
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/42097/1/__Libfile_repository_Content_Neumayer, E_Neumayer_Does _California_effect_2012_Neumayer_Does _California_effect_2012.pdf
I'm not so sure. A lot of environmental laws require companies to self report exceeding limits, and they actually do. It was a common thing for my contact engineer colleagues to be called up at night to calculate release amounts because their unit had an upset.
A law like this would force companies to at least pretend to comply. None can really say "we're not going to because you can't catch us".
Watermarks? Super important. Helping the unhoused though, nooooo.
Hmm, technically speaking we could require images be digitally signed, tie it to a CA, and then browsers could display a “this image is not trusted” warning like we do for https issues.
People that don’t source their images right would get their cert revoked.
Would be a win for photo attribution too.
This comment shows all the thirty seconds of thought your “Hmm” implies.
You also had 30 seconds but chose to insult instead of contribute. See you at the next comment section.
Even if it was enforceable, there are watermark removal AI tools.
It is enforceable. Not in all cases, probably not even in the majority, but it only needs a few examples to be hit with large fines and everyone doing legal things will take notice. Often you can find enough evidence to get someone to confess to using AI and that is aall the courts need.
Scammers of course will not put this in, but they are already breaking the law so this might be - like tax evasion - be a way to get scammers who you can't get for something else.