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California bill would require bots to disclose that they are bots

veeto.app

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Re: California bill would require bots to disclose that they are bots

#91

A decade ago, when chat bots were a lot less useful, a common piece of etiquette was that it's fine for a bot to pretend to be a human or God or whatever, but if you directly ask it if it's a bot it has to confirm that. Basically of the bot version of that myth about undercover cops. I don't see a downside in requiring public-facing bots to do that Not sure if that's what the proposal is about though, it's currently…

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> It’s deaccelerationist, and that’s a bad thing

This sounds like a religious position, not something which will lead to positive conversation. I would consider whether your personal biases are causing you to interpret this as an attack and miss some perspective: for example, if these are useful tools would it really lead to discrimination? If they’re actually better tools, I’d think “bot” would have a positive connotation just as most people jumped to using the web instead of calling businesses on the phone.

I think a better comparison would be product labeling and disclosure laws, where there are very few examples where reducing the information available to consumers leads to better outcomes. People don’t care about whether something is made by hand or machine anywhere near as much as they care about the quality of the final product. The reason people care about talking to bots is that they’re often used to worsen service and people do not want to waste their time on a bot which cannot help them. This seems entirely fair.

Re: California bill would require bots to disclose that they are bots

#92

A decade ago, when chat bots were a lot less useful, a common piece of etiquette was that it's fine for a bot to pretend to be a human or God or whatever, but if you directly ask it if it's a bot it has to confirm that. Basically of the bot version of that myth about undercover cops. I don't see a downside in requiring public-facing bots to do that Not sure if that's what the proposal is about though, it's currently…

I remember the opposite. The chat bots popular in 2015 were trying to pass the Turing Test and would deny being a bot. The 2025 chat bots popular now are pretty good about explaining they are a bot. Of course, that's just generalizing the popular ones - anyone can make their own do as they please.

Re: California bill would require bots to disclose that they are bots

#93
post #62
post #17

Interesting. I’m afraid this won’t really go anywhere, but it’s a good conversation to have On one hand, judging by the comments, there’s quite a bit of interest on disclosure On the other hand, corporations and big advertisers (spammers?) might not really want it. Or is there a positive aspect in disclosure for them?

As bots get smarter we need to give them more access not less, people have been used as useful idiots and puppets for far too long I don't see why we should make an exception for bots.

If having to disclose to your users/customers that they're interacting with a bot makes them stop interacting then that sucks for you. I work in this space and we proudly advertise when you're talking to a bot and our users actually choose it over the option to connect to a human.

Our staff do better work but the bot is instant. It seems people would rather go back and forth a few times and be in the drivers seat than wait on a person.

Re: California bill would require bots to disclose that they are bots

#95
Industry will get there pretty soon regardless of that bill or another, since there is a paradigm shift.

The conversation is no longer about scraping bots versus genuine human visitors. Today’s reality involves legitimate users leveraging AI agents to accomplish tasks—like scanning e-commerce sites for the best deals, auto-checking out, or running sophisticated data queries. Traditional red flags (such as numerous rapid requests or odd navigation flows) can easily represent honest customer behavior once enhanced by an AI assistant.

see what I have posted a couple of weeks ago -

https://blog.tarab.ai/p/bot-management-reimagined-in-the

Re: California bill would require bots to disclose that they are bots

#96

A decade ago, when chat bots were a lot less useful, a common piece of etiquette was that it's fine for a bot to pretend to be a human or God or whatever, but if you directly ask it if it's a bot it has to confirm that. Basically of the bot version of that myth about undercover cops. I don't see a downside in requiring public-facing bots to do that Not sure if that's what the proposal is about though, it's currently…

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Impersonating humans is creepy, unnecessary and a bad business practice that creates negative customer experiences that are likely to result in a hostile response. This law is only necessary because of incompetent management making decisions for short term profit at the expense of reputation and long term growth.

Re: California bill would require bots to disclose that they are bots

#97

A decade ago, when chat bots were a lot less useful, a common piece of etiquette was that it's fine for a bot to pretend to be a human or God or whatever, but if you directly ask it if it's a bot it has to confirm that. Basically of the bot version of that myth about undercover cops. I don't see a downside in requiring public-facing bots to do that Not sure if that's what the proposal is about though, it's currently…

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[deleted]

Re: California bill would require bots to disclose that they are bots

#98

since the Veeto website seems to be struggling, here's the official CA legislature page for the bill: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... seems fairly narrowly written - it looks like it's removing the requirement that bot usage is illegal only if there's "intent to mislead". it seems like that'd be very difficult to prove and would result in the law not really being enforced. instead ther…

I enjoyed all the corrections of "Internet Web site" to "internet website".

Re: California bill would require bots to disclose that they are bots

#99
post #65
post #43

I like that this bill partially implements the second law of robotics: "1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law."

Pretty much all of the stories on the laws of robotics were about why the laws suck and don't work.

I think you deeply misunderstood the stories.

Re: California bill would require bots to disclose that they are bots

#100

A decade ago, when chat bots were a lot less useful, a common piece of etiquette was that it's fine for a bot to pretend to be a human or God or whatever, but if you directly ask it if it's a bot it has to confirm that. Basically of the bot version of that myth about undercover cops. I don't see a downside in requiring public-facing bots to do that Not sure if that's what the proposal is about though, it's currently…

It bothers me that they didn't consider that this should be bilateral: a bot must confirm that it is a bot, and a human must confirm it is a human.

I wouldn't want humans pretending to be bots, for a variety of reasons.

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