Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 278 posts

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#111

Post by headsoup »

jacquesm wrote: post #110
amelius wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the point is that they still save on average. Most calls can probably be handled using a simple script.

They may save on average, but that's just shifting the expense to the customer in terms of wasted time. If there is anything I've learned over 30 years of running businesses that being disrespectful towards your customers' time it is that you will end up losing those customers.

The saving grace for these online services seems to basically just be that the potential customer base is so ridiculously huge that it still pays vs effort required. Same for the big social giants etc.

No matter how many people know better, there are plenty more that don't.

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#112

Post by zapita »

jlangenauer wrote: post #69

I am reminded of Thoreau's quote: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." The root of the problem is not that we have bots, but that we have normalised lying and deception as part of everyday business. We allow companies to pretend that bots are human beings, and allow call-center employees in third-world countries to pretend (even sometimes though elaborate lying) t…

Great. What do you propose?

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#113

Post by dalbasal »

jlangenauer wrote: post #69

I am reminded of Thoreau's quote: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." The root of the problem is not that we have bots, but that we have normalised lying and deception as part of everyday business. We allow companies to pretend that bots are human beings, and allow call-center employees in third-world countries to pretend (even sometimes though elaborate lying) t…

The "root" of the problem is a tricky metaphor. It can be defined different ways, and the most abstract (ie, You can't swing at it) is often what people come up with.

How would you fix, at a general level, the overall human & corporate tendency to play loose with the truth? I mean, we're subtly dishonest all the time.

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#114

Post by comboy »

nfoz wrote: post #90
throwaway13337 wrote: post #60

California 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.

This worst-case web would still support all of the original use-cases of the web, where ordinary folks and organizations were posting ordinary documents that anyone anywhere in the world could view. It's small-business webapps that have problems. But I would be very glad for those to stop doing so many terribly sketchy things that have become the norm on this consumer-unfriendly internet we're dealing with. So like I…

Not really. If you have a personal website with analytics (even your own), suddenly you need to display some cookie warning. If you allow comments all of a sudden you need to follow GDPR. Understanding it may require more time that you were willing to spend on share your ideas with the world. So if you really want to share you move to some big platform that handles it all for you.

The law is already so complex that even within a single country or a state, people who study it need specialisations. Regulators have no grasp regarding existing laws or full extent of laws they are voting for. It's madness.

Small business that government or a big company doesn't like can already be killed by thousand cuts because they don't have infinite amount of money to spend on lawyers.

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#115

Post by notahacker »

tastroder wrote: post #106
dorgo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious. Are you complaining about support not beeing able to solve your issue, or about talking to bots instead of humans? Assume a strong AI with enough authority would handle support. Would you still prefer humans?

I'd have a problem with both in the support case. The alternative to a human contact is a natural language interface that just wastes my time and/or laziness in other parts of the business. If my problem is covered by your FAQ, improve search. If my problem can be solved by a bot, let me do it in your UI. If handling my problem through a human requires more information prepend a form. Provide a clear path to skip/esc…

> If my problem is covered by your FAQ, improve search. If my problem can be solved by a bot, let me do it in your UI.

This assumes that people who have a question they need answering will consider searching for an answer or getting to grips with the UI first, rather than heading straight to ask customer support. That's often not the case. Long before support chatbots became widespread, telephone trees made a point of telling every single user in the queue the help section of their website existed...

Agree bots should often make it easier to escalate and should default to escalation rather than blowing up[1], but if a large proportion of your queries are actually answered by telling people the FAQ page is a thing, it's a bit difficult to justify paying humans to do it.

[1]if escalation takes a couple of minutes for a response escalation and blowing up might be indistinguishable...

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#116

Post by michaelt »

repolfx wrote: post #94

I really hate this stuff. The article starts out with a paragraph of complete nonsense: "When you ask experts how bots influence politics—that is, what specifically these bits of computer code that purport to be human can accomplish during an election—they will give you a list: bots can smear the opposition through personal attacks; they can exaggerate voters’ fears and anger by repeating short simple slogans; they c…

This whole story is asserting that there are programs routinely running around the internet indistinguishable from humans, making points so excellent they successfully persuade people to switch their political affiliation, which is simply false.

The theory isn't that bots are artificial general intelligences trying to convince individuals with clever intellectual debate. The theory is bots try to move the Overton Window [1] - to change what the average person thinks the average person thinks - by making certain opinions/arguments appear more prominent by repetition.

A bot doesn't need to be an AGI - or even capable of responding to replies to its own posts. All it needs to do is keep 100 accounts in good standing with reposts and low-effort comments, then every hundred posts or so a human operator jumps on to make a driveby comment like "LOL give it up Mickey Mouse is never going out of copyright" or "LOL we get it you vape" or "LOL it's the government, what did you expect?" or "LOL like America hasn't done the same thing but much worse" in an appropriate thread.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#117

Post by acdha »

jlangenauer wrote: post #69

I am reminded of Thoreau's quote: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." The root of the problem is not that we have bots, but that we have normalised lying and deception as part of everyday business. We allow companies to pretend that bots are human beings, and allow call-center employees in third-world countries to pretend (even sometimes though elaborate lying) t…

I agree that this is a widespread problem in many areas but I do think there’s a strong argument that bots are worth singling out in the context of social networking, where the bots are often used to steer public opinion in non-obvious ways with no clear ownership. It’s one thing if Samsung’s support chat-bot is misleading but that at least is obviously linked to the company in question whereas, say, the fake Twitter accounts complaining about Nike using photo stolen from real people aren’t easily associated with whoever is pushing that campaign and the intention is clearly to shift public opinion. There are good arguments for preserving anonymity but banning misrepresentation seems more defensible.

(I mentioned the Nike thing not because this is limited to conservatives but because that was the most recent example which came to mind: there were a bunch of well-promoted tweets from accounts using profile pictures of attractive young women which a quick tineye search showed were long-running Instagram users under different names)

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#118

Post by hrktb »

sushid wrote: post #59
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #9

That 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…

I think you are right.

I also think it’s an issue, as this law is set up to start a cat and mouse game, where precedents are slowly established, while bad faith actors find other workarounds and run with it until new rulings are set, to then rince and repeat.

When it comes to spam or ads, iterating workarounds is faster than bringing cases to court, so the traditional approach is problematic.

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#119

Post by dannyw »

wccrawford wrote: post #101
hajhatten wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> see the Samsung ad which they're currently being hauled over the coals for in Australia. For people not in the know, apparently Samsung is marketing its latest phones as water proof with ads showing surfers and people fully clothed under water. ACCC does not approve of this, as the phones aren't IP rated for use in salt water. https://www.techradar.com/news/samsung-is-getting-sued-in-au...

And if the article I read is true, they aren't honoring the warranty in the case of water damage.

Correct, my phone died after briefly exposing it to salt weather on a beach. I was misled by the ads I saw, there was no implication except in very fine print that saltwater will immediately fry your phone.

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#120

Post by qwsxyh »

comboy wrote: post #114
nfoz wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This worst-case web would still support all of the original use-cases of the web, where ordinary folks and organizations were posting ordinary documents that anyone anywhere in the world could view. It's small-business webapps that have problems. But I would be very glad for those to stop doing so many terribly sketchy things that have become the norm on this consumer-unfriendly internet we're dealing with. So like I…

Not really. If you have a personal website with analytics (even your own), suddenly you need to display some cookie warning. If you allow comments all of a sudden you need to follow GDPR. Understanding it may require more time that you were willing to spend on share your ideas with the world. So if you really want to share you move to some big platform that handles it all for you. The law is already so complex that e…

> If you have a personal website with analytics (even your own), suddenly you need to display some cookie warning. If you allow comments all of a sudden you need to follow GDPR.

Not having both of those is a good thing, so I see no downside.

Post reply on HN