Comment by wwfn

15 days ago

> 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

2 comments

wwfn

hsuduebc2 15 days ago

But most regulations are, and can be, enforced because the perpetrator can simply be caught. That’s the difference. This is not enforceable in any meaningful way. The only way it could change anything would be through whistleblowers, for example someone inside a major outlet like the New York Times reporting to authorities that AI was being used. On the contrary, if you systematically create laws that are, by their nature, impossible to enforce, you weaken trust in the law itself by turning it into something that exists more on paper than in reality.

wwfn 14 days ago

  * I suspect many existing and reasonable regulations do not meet that "simply caught" classification. @rconti's comment above[1] gives some examples of regulations on process that are not observed in the output (food, child labor). I'll add accounting, information control (HIPAA, CUI, etc), environmental protections.

  * Newsroom staff is incentivized to enforce the regulation. It protects their livelihood. From the article: 
  > Notably, the bill would cement some labor protections for newsroom workers 

  * Mandatory AI labeling is not impossible to enforce. At worst, it requires random audits (who was paid to write this story, do they attest to doing so). At best, it encourages preemptive provenance tracking (that could even be accessible to the news consumer! I'd like that).

One reason for the regulation is we fear hallucinations slipping into the public record -- even if most LLM usage is useful/harmless. Legal restrictions ideally prevent this, but also give a mechanism for recourse when it does happen.

Say a news story goes off the rails and reports a police officer turned into a frog [2] or makes up some law[3]. Someone thinks that's odd and alerts whatever authority. The publisher can be investigated, reprimanded, and ideally motivated to provide better labeling or QC on their LLM usage.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46915463 [2]: https://www.wate.com/news/ai-generated-police-report-says-of... [3]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/judge-fines-lawyers...