Comment by raincole
13 hours ago
> 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.
> 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.
That's even worse, because then it's not really a law, it's a license for political persecution of anyone disfavored by whoever happens to be in power.
Never mind the damage that was willfully allowed to happen that the bill was supposed to protect from happening.
Meta made $60B in Q4 2025. A one-time $1.4B fine, 20 years after enactment, is not "getting hammered".
They didn’t make $60B in Q4 2025 in Texas. 1.4B was 100% profit from Texas for years, that a big fine.
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> Texas' sat on its biometric data act quite quietly then hammered meta with a $1.4B settlement 20 years after the bill's enactment.
Sounds like ignoring it worked fine for them then.
That sounds like it will be in the courts for ages before Facebook wins on selective prosecution.
Or it'll end up like California cancer warnings: every news site will put the warning on, just in case, making it worthless.
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.
>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”
Why though? Did the AI play the role of an editor or did it play the role of a reporter seems like a clear distinction to me and likely anyone else familiar enough with how journalism works.
… or the sesame seed labeling law that resulted in sesame seeds being added to everything.
https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc...
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.
As someone who is allergic to sesame, that is insanely annoying.
I just came across this for the first time. I ordered a precision screw driver kit and it came with a cancer warning on it. I was really taken aback and then learned about this.
Some legislation which sounds good in concept and is well-intended ends up being having little to no positive impact in practice. But it still leaves businesses with ongoing compliance costs/risks, taxpayers footing the bill for an enforcement bureaucracy forever and consumers with either annoying warning interruptions or yet more 'warning message noise'.
It's odd that legislators seem largely incapable of learning from the rich history of past legislative mistakes. Regulation needs to be narrowly targeted, clearly defined and have someone smart actually think through how the real-world will implement complying as well as identifying likely unintended consequences and perverse incentives. Another net improvement would be for any new regs passed to have an automatic sunset provision where they need to be renewed a few years later under a process which makes it easy to revise or relax certain provisions.
Known by the state of cancer to cause California. I do think P65 warnings are pretty useful for the most part jokes aside
Essentially useless if everyone slaps on that label. Kinda like hospital alarm fatigue.
But this just my uninformed opinion, perhaps those that work in the health industry think differently.
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Yup. Or like "necessary cookies" that aren't all that necessary when it works just fine without.
Just because you doing notice that it is not working properly, that doesn't mean you haven't broken anything.
Well, they're necessary if you're spying on your visitors.
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
Don’t give the EU any ideas
Yeah it’s like that episode of schoolhouse rock about how a bill becomes a law now takes place in squid games.
>But I wonder who that sad little scrap of 8,523 pieces of paper is?
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.
> 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.
> the idea that you can just ban AI from certain settings is a fantasy because there’s no technical way to actually guarantee enforcement.
By that token bans on illegal drugs are fantasy. Whereas in fact, enforcement doesn't need to be guaranteed to be effective.
There may be little technical means to distinguish at the moment. But could that have something to do with lack of motivation? Let's see how many "AI" $$$ suddenly become available to this once this law provides the incentive.
> By that token bans on illegal drugs are fantasy.
I think you have this exactly right. They are mostly enforced against the poor and political enemies.
Well considering how ineffective the War on Drugs has been - is that really a great analogy?
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Sure they can be enforced. Your comment seems to be based on the idea of detecting AI writing from the output. But you can enforce this law based on the way content is created. The same way you can enforce food safety laws from conditions of the kitchen, not the taste of the food. Child labor laws can be enforced. And so on.
Unless you're trying to tell me that writers won't report on their business that's trying to replace them with AI.
> You’re essentially passing laws that only apply to people who volunteer to follow them . .
Like every law passed forever (not quite but you get the picture!) [1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_of_the_governed
And you can easily prompt your way out of the typical LLM style. “Written in the style of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”
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
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.
This still doesn't remove all the slop. You need sampler or fine-tuning tricks for it. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061
> passing laws that only apply to people who volunteer to follow them
That's a concerning lens to view regulations. Obviously true, but for all laws. Regulations don't apply to only to what would be immediately observable offenses.
There are lots of bad actors and instances where the law is ignored because getting caught isn't likely. Those are conspiracies! They get harder to maintain with more people involved and the reason for whistle-blower protections.
VW's Dieselgate[1] comes to mind albeit via measurable discrepancy. Maybe Enron or WorldCom (via Cynthia Cooper) [2] is a better example.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCI_Inc.#Accounting_scandals
C2PA-enabled cameras (Sony Alpha range, Leica, and the Google Pixel 10) sign the digital images they record.
So legislators, should they so choose, could demand source material be recorded on C2PA enabled cameras and produce the original recordings on demand.
The idea that you can just ban drinking and driving is a fantasy because there’s no technical way to actually guarantee enforcement.
I know that sounds ridiculous but it kind of illustrates the problem with your logic. We don’t just write laws that are guaranteed to have 100% compliance and/or 100% successful enforcement. If that were the case, we’d have way fewer laws and little need for courts/a broader judicial system.
The goal is getting most AI companies to comply and making sure that most of those that don’t follow the law face sufficient punishment to discourage them (and others). Additionally, you use that opportunity to undo what damage you can, be it restitution or otherwise for those negatively impacted.
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.
What does that look like? Can you describe your worst case scenario?
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.
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.
Worst case? Armed officers entering your home without warrant, taking away your GPU card?
They can do that anyway. What does that have to do with the content of the proposed law?
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.
Who are the honest players generating AI slop articles
The ones honestly labelling their articles e.g. "AI can make mistakes". Full marks to Google web search for leading the way!
>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.