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

171–180 of 278 posts

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

#171

Post by orasis »

moorhosj wrote: post #125
repolfx wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not answering the question, you're just asserting someone will figure the answer out later and this is totally fine, even though it may not be fine for the person who thought they were doing things right and then suddenly discover they weren't. Vagueness in law isn't a good thing. It leads to people randomly losing everything, even if they made a good faith attempt to follow the "spirit" of the law (whatever t…

The vagueness is how the American legal system has worked since inception. I don’t see it changing now. Society changes faster than representatives can legislate.

The fix is to not pass the law in the first place. Regulation generally favors incumbents.

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

#172

Post by sailfast »

“Bots are not people” - ok, but if they’re written by people for a specific intent meant as speech, is that no longer protected speech? If I program a bot to chant slogans on Twitter, isn’t that something I’d have the right to do?

I’d argue yes, but where they may have an argument is where I respond “no I am human” if people ask me about being a bot - intentionally misleading.

They may have more luck here in the commercial space where they can better regulate and enforce these ruleS like advertising and other sales practices. Not sure where this goes in politics or other domains at all in terms of enforeceability.

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

#173

Post by egypturnash »

luckylion wrote: post #38
WalterBright wrote: post #27

Earlier 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.

My support experience with Amazon Fulfillment involved several months of going back and forth with what I think were humans whose native language was not English, bound by a script, until I learnt that the shortcut to getting an actual human who is allowed to deviate from a script is sending an email to Bezos.

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

#174

Post by wysifnwyg »

jellicle wrote: post #160
brownbat wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> allow call-center employees in third-world countries to pretend I agree companies should be forced to tell the truth to their customers, but in all cases where they're asking for details about the customer service rep? That could go weird places. If a caller demanded to know the rep's HIV status, we wouldn't insist the company disclose it. We'd probably demand they didn't. Honesty is important, ok, but the customer…

Declining to tell someone something is not the same as lying to them. And declining to tell the customer "I am HIV positive" is not the same as declining to tell them impersonal information. You may or may not be aware but there are companies that actively instruct their international call center personnel to tell customers "My name is Sally and I live in Fort Worth Texas, right near you" when none of that is true.

I think this is an important distinction that the parent comment failed to address and which destroys the premise of their entire argument.

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

#175

Post by qwsxyh »

sokoloff wrote: post #135
qwsxyh wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not having comments on anything personal is a good thing with zero downside?

Hacker News and Reddit comments have made me sure that comments are never a good thing.

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

#177

Post by tablethnuser »

CM30 wrote: post #122

Of course, this all raises the question of whether there are only unethical use cases for bots pretending to be human, or whether a law like this could hit benign uses for bots as well. For instance, ARGs could have bot accounts for fictional characters on social media sites. These accounts could give pre recorded messages that then hint that the user should visit some third party site for more clues or information.…

In these gaming use cases the bots can be appropriately disclosed without getting in the way of the game. A couple decades ago there was an ARG about government conspiracies which called your house to give you clues from in-game characters and it started with a 4th wall breaking preamble so that if someone not playing answered the phone they wouldn't get worried. The game was still fun. IIRC you could go into the settings and disable the preamble, which would be a fine place in the UX to disclose the bots and capture the user's agreement.

Unfortunately for the game (and the world), 9/11 happened a few months after launch and due to the theme of the game it was shut down. Now it's just an interesting bit of gaming history!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_(video_game)

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

#178

Post by nradov »

novok wrote: post #103
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...

Samsung isn’t the only one. Apple is similar too in its carve outs for water damage in it’s warranty. Im guessing samsung weasels out of it by saying water ‘resistance’ vs proof, but still marketing it with surfers and such? My water resistant series 3 apple watch screen died after swimming in a pool the next day to give a personal example.

It may not be officially recommended, but I know people who have gone surfing with recent model iPhones and Apple watches. They seem to do fine, but maybe that's just luck?

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

#179

Post by [deleted] »

CM30 wrote: post #122

Of course, this all raises the question of whether there are only unethical use cases for bots pretending to be human, or whether a law like this could hit benign uses for bots as well. For instance, ARGs could have bot accounts for fictional characters on social media sites. These accounts could give pre recorded messages that then hint that the user should visit some third party site for more clues or information.…

[deleted]

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

#180

Post by 0xffff2 »

ourmandave wrote: post #170

As if millions of Facebook accounts cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

As if millions of Facebook accounts kept right on going because none of the people running them are in California and Facebook has no incentive to actively police them.
Post reply on HN