California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by ticmasta » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

perfmode wrote: post #98

murat124 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing with you but I believe Thoreau said that about philanthropy. > There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

imho, this strengthens the OP’s use of the quote. successful Tech founders are especially guilty of producing what they strive in vain to relieve.

perhaps, but I think Thoreau is talking primarily about the risk of producing a systemic dependency, i.e. the "teach a man to fish" philosophy. He was an ardent believer in self-sufficiency and prioritized individual autonomy over maximizing group benefit. He has a lot of great things to say but you could argue their relevancy and context is often misrepresented.

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

#222

Post by mirimir » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 6:04 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #36

mirimir wrote: post #8

> 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 wasn't thinking it through. With the law, investigators can devote resources to the issue. And still, I'm dubious about the prospects for nontrivial prosecutions.

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

#223

Post by mirimir » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 6:05 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #212

mirimir wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, companies that were quite happy to pay for robocalls and social media bots to promote their product are not interested in paying anonymous people anonymously in Bitcoins for campaigns that might get them into trouble, no matter how proficient the bot developers might be at laundering their crypto earnings. That'll be the law working as intended

True. But there's lots more deniability for political campaigns. Free speech and all.

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

#224

Post by kbenson » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

arbitrage wrote: post #158

comboy wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had a website about programming and it had a forum part is it purely personal? What if is it just comment section? What if I had ads to cover server costs vs when I don't have them now? I closed the website because I don't know. And I don't think I would say I know until I hire a lawyer. Re analytics part from another comment, I only care how they interact with my website. Without sharing that info with anybody.…

What if aliens came down and probed your butt? You're throwing about ridiculously obscure edge cases that don't really matter to the point at hand.

A law that applies to large swatch of regular, benign behavior of people and makes it illegal is not a good law. If that benign behavior is not targeted and the law is used to good effect, it may be beneficial in the short term, and be useful, but it is not good, because it gives the state extra leverage against normal people that they can apply it unevenly.

A decade from now, the state might target certain sites with forums that say things they don't approve of, and use these laws to do so. Is giving the state more tools to circumvent freedoms like freedom of speech due to technicalities a good thing? How about in stead of making a law that blankets many benign interactions and relying on enforcement of only actual problems be up to the opinion of the enforcers, we try to target the actual problem behavior as tightly as possible, and then identify the edges where problem behavior exists and pass new legislation to apply to that?

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

#225

Post by kbenson » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

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.

1) There is already balkanization based on countries. Does California change that situation so much? Enough that it shouldn't perform it's role in the U.S. as a laboratory for legislation (a role of all states)?

2) Commerce and communication restrictions should not be considered without also considering the purpose and benefit the legislation intends to cause. First and foremost is whether it actually helps more than it harms. For example, it could have been (and I'm sure was) argued that abolishing slavery was problematic from the standpoint of groups of people and businesses interacting with those states and what it meant to use slaves in them or take slaves to them. The point is not to equate this issue with the abolitionist movement, but to point out that how the law affects interactions between states may have very little (or very great) bearing on whether it should be ratified, and it depends entirely on the legislation in question. Great leaps in both positive and negative directions both cause friction between (nation)states, so friction itself is a poor indicator of whether legislation is good or bad.

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

#226

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 6:22 PM UTC

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.

If you want to sell something in a place, you abide by that place's laws. If you want to sell in a zillion different jurisdictions, you're big enough to do comply by each law.

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

#227

Post by scarejunba » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 6:24 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #76

scarejunba wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, amusing that people thought this was wholly irrelevant. Here's what I was thinking of when I said that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI Also amusing that there are two confident opposite opinions in response.

What does this video montage you linked have to do with computer-generated faces speaking computer-generated voices?

It's the same content. Different people with different voices. You could have it sound like you have your local folks giving you info when instead it's from some centralized location.

I could control a message without it being a single guy saying it all.

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

#228

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 6:28 PM UTC

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?

How about you try to comply with the spirit of the law?

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

#229

Post by kbenson » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 6:33 PM UTC

Slartie wrote: post #95

TeMPOraL wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. And it led into split of Ethereum into two chains, one followed by people who believed that code should be law, and other who believed the code should be law only when it works in their favour.

Which can be considered a concession of failure for the idea of "law-as-code", because apparently when the going gets tough, that concept needs to fall back to good old "law-by-humans" in order to continue being relevant and accepted by people. As a system that should not ever be in need of any fallback, that spells fundamental defeat.

We create these systems to be of use to humans. When they aren't of use to humans, that's a bug, and is viewed as something to fix, so we convene humans to provide a fix, whether for a specific case or to the system overall.

Ultimately, the only ways that situation doesn't play out is if the system is designed perfectly not just for current use but all future uses, or Humans are removed entirely from the equation. Since the former is impossible, and the latter means the system is either irrelevant or we're all dead and gone, we might as well accept Human intervention as inevitable.

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

#230

Post by LostJourneyman » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 6:35 PM UTC

burfog wrote: post #41

dessant wrote: post #22

I 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.

I've been assuming that it's a pre-determined initial message, but that a real human in a low-cost country would immediately be involved if I bothered to respond. What portion of the chat pop up windows do you think are purely bot? Might any of them be purely human?

It depends build to build. The standard approach is one of 4:

1) The bot initiates the conversation and your initial message gets sent directly to an agent. This is the older model that's in most common use today.

2) The bot initiates contact and based on your responses does some simple keyword matching and delivers help article links where possible or asks for more information IVR style, then when it hits an "I don't know" point or if the agent option is selected, offloads to an agent.

3) This is my favorite style, honestly: The bot initiates the interaction, and does some machine learning backed AI chat, all the while the interaction is monitored by an agent who can take over at any time. Similar to #2, if the bot hits a sticking point, it'll just queue to an agent. This unfortunately is the least common of the implementations.

4) This is the most modern and is becoming the industry leader: Fully AI bot trained against a veritable Everest of chat conversations for that entity/industry, only offloads to a human when you shout "HUMAN" at it enough times or if it gets really stuck and confidence intervals start falling rapidly.

NOTE/DISCLAIMER: I design and implement these systems for a living, and we don't often get much say in the customer-side UX, so I'm sorry if you've gotten stuck with an arguably bad build!

(Edit: formatting)