What are the implications of this on the Turing Test?
California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure
51–60 of 278 posts
Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1) No, proofreading is not authorship. It is when the substitution is both context-aware and not what you intended to write. > 2,3,4) A judge could reasonably find that you were attempting to circumvent the law and declare all of these as “bot”. Wait, so if someone sends you a question and the suggestions can detect from the context your answer, you're a bot because you chose the suggestion instead of typing out wo…
Your complaint seems to boil down to "if the law is so imprecise and open to interpretation, how am I supposed to game the system?". Well, this may be a surprise to some people here but the law is not intended as a system to be gamed. Loopholes are just day 0 exploits of the legal system.
It's just the opposite. If the law isn't nailed down then people with fancy lawyers can argue it means whatever they want, jurisdiction shop to get it in front of a favorable judge, etc.
Making the law clear and correct is the only way to prevent the ambiguities from being construed in favor of whoever has the most money to spend litigating it.
Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure
#53> Violators could face fines under state statutes related to unfair competition. I doubt that anyone running bots, and who is technically competent, will be identifiable or findable. I mean, I could do it, and I'm just a random anonymous coward.
I think part of the goal of this law is to make this be true: > I doubt that anyone running bots, and who is technically competent, will be identifiable or findable. Telemarketing, for example, was done a great deal by perfectly legal, traceable businesses. Once it was made illegal, it was forced underground, and volume dropped immensely. > I could do it, and I'm just a random anonymous coward. Could you? Hiding the…
I'd do it using Bitcoin. And I know how to use Bitcoin ~anonymously. Or some other cryptocurrency that's actually anonymous.
It's true that getting assets from cryptocurrencies is hard. I don't do it. I just spend my ~anonymous income on ~anonymous servers to play with.
But if you're moving enough assets, you can pay people, who know what they're doing, to move it. As we've seen in real estate markets in many cities.
Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn’t classify that as a bot as there’s still human interaction required.
So a bot farm is fine as long as you have a human intern there rubber stamping whatever content it generates?
Am I missing something or wouldn't you need one real human per bot for rubberstamping? I'm sure this is targetting bots pretending to be humans that do not exist. If you want to be personally responsible with your real face and name for everything your singular bot writes, that would still solve nearly all current bot problems.
Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assistive texting is covered in a separate reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360152 The law clearly targets automated content creation that is not declared as such, not assistive writing technologies, and this will be considered by the judicial system when evaluating your stated intentions and actual actions. If you are unable to predict with confidence the outcome of your intentions and actions as t…
> The law clearly targets automated content creation that is not declared as such, not assistive writing technologies How are those two different things? In each case it's a machine generating and suggesting things that you may want to write. Presumably in the second case the suggestions would have to be more sophisticated in order to be coherent most of the time, but that still doesn't really give you any useful cri…
> How are those two different things?
They are of different colour[0]. Sounds like the law is aiming at that distinction.
Whether or not a piece of computer-generated content was "automated content" vs. "assistive writing" might entirely depend on the answer to the question "why was this piece of writing created?".
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Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure
#56I felt stupid, but I have fallen victim to this on dpd.com while tracking a package. A helpful chat popup has appeared where I could request assistance from a support agent, but it was not disclosed that the agent is a bot. Needless to say I have spent a couple of minutes repeatedly asking a question, and even rephrasing it while being frustrated that this person does not seem to grasp my issue.
My recent experience with a credit card customer support agent might as well have been me conversing with a bot. It was actually more frustrating for both me and the agent, that they were so strictly bound to a script, with no room for their creative human brain to actually adapt their response to the unique context of my issue.
When customer service is nothing more then an agent choosing from various scripted responses, what is the point?
Escalating my issue up through 2 senior agents, i finally reached a human who was allowed by their employer to actively apply context to their support tasks.
The use of programmed constraints on a system and how that system is sold to customers, this is a wicked problem of our times.
Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure
#57I felt stupid, but I have fallen victim to this on dpd.com while tracking a package. A helpful chat popup has appeared where I could request assistance from a support agent, but it was not disclosed that the agent is a bot. Needless to say I have spent a couple of minutes repeatedly asking a question, and even rephrasing it while being frustrated that this person does not seem to grasp my issue.
Those are fairly easy to spot. One dead giveaway is their excessively chirpy voice. Or, as you did, just say something that puts them off script.
I guess you didn't watch the Google I/O presentation earlier this year (which is probably what this law is about I would guess):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VN56jQMWM
Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are fairly easy to spot. One dead giveaway is their excessively chirpy voice. Or, as you did, just say something that puts them off script.
> Or, as you did, just say something that puts them off script. I don't know about that. Does Amazon's support use bots? Or are they just in a remote call center using auto translate to communicate with customers? Because in general, they appear like bots to me: they will parse for key words and reply to those, ignoring context and subtle differences that make their replies sound weird.
I doubt it would be better than their email reply bot, which is transparently inept. I wouldn't mind an email bot if it got me what I needed, but it was useless.
Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure
#59That will be a fun one to interpret. So if I use autocorrect, am I a bot? What if the device makes next word suggestions and I use them? What if the device suggests the entire post, but I manually approve it? What if it suggests five separate posts and I approve them all at once?
I'm not sure why you're being so facetious. In fact, I wonder why HN always has comments like these.
Lawmakers are purposefully vague because judges can decipher what the spirit of the law is and fine corporations or condone specific use cases when they are brought up in court. You can't go into court to challenge a law with hypothetical cases for a good reason. Do you want lawmakers to arbitrarily impose constraints like only 10% of non article words can be suggested per message composition or only 2 posts per minute are allowed?
It is a fact in life that technology changes and improves things beyond what we could have foreseen in just a few years. The degree of flexibility built into these laws is a huge plus. Not a flaw.
Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure
#60California is setting a dangerous precident.
If individual states each enact individual laws governing the internet, then only large companies will have the resources to follow them.
We'll see a balkanization of the web wherein it's no longer very world wide. Small internet businesses will become harder and harder to start. Big monopolies will become entrenched.
It's not pretty.