A new bill in New York would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content

Post by elric » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 8:53 AM UTC

bogwog wrote: post #178

elric wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a piece of wooden furniture some time ago. It came with a label saying that the state of California knows it to be a carcinogen. I live in Belgium. It was weird.

Just an observation, but this California meme seems like the go-to talking point for anti AI regulation crowd lately.

Post by wwfn » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 1:22 PM UTC

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #217

wwfn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> passing laws that only apply to people who volunteer to follow them That's a concerning lens to view regulations. Obviously true, but for all laws. Regulations don't apply to only to what would be immediately observable offenses. There are lots of bad actors and instances where the law is ignored because getting caught isn't likely. Those are conspiracies! They get harder to maintain with more people involved and t…

But most regulations are, and can be, enforced because the perpetrator can simply be caught. That’s the difference. This is not enforceable in any meaningful way. The only way it could change anything would be through whistleblowers, for example someone inside a major outlet like the New York Times reporting to authorities that AI was being used. On the contrary, if you systematically create laws that are, by their n…

  * I suspect many existing and reasonable regulations do not meet that "simply caught" classification. @rconti's comment above[1] gives some examples of regulations on process that are not observed in the output (food, child labor). I'll add accounting, information control (HIPAA, CUI, etc), environmental protections.

  * Newsroom staff is incentivized to enforce the regulation. It protects their livelihood. From the article: 
  > Notably, the bill would cement some labor protections for newsroom workers 

  * Mandatory AI labeling is not impossible to enforce. At worst, it requires random audits (who was paid to write this story, do they attest to doing so). At best, it encourages preemptive provenance tracking (that could even be accessible to the news consumer! I'd like that).   

Post by jfengel » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

CodingJeebus wrote: post #204

foxbarrington wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A common reaction I get to https://forty.news is that the stories “need sources” which I always find funny. I don’t hear the same demand of sources from every other news outlet (I find it extra weird because all FN’s stories are 40 years old, simple to verify, and can’t push an agenda the same way). Totally agree with you: all newspapers should cite sources. What’s silly to me is how selectively people care—big outle…

> all newspapers should cite sources. You'd lose a lot of valid sourcing if you made this a requirement. For example, the Catholic Church scandal investigation would never have seen the light of day if the key legal sources corroborating the story had to give up their identity as part of the process. Speaking off the record is often where a lot of those kinds of stories come together. And the reaction around the worl…

Post by CodingJeebus » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #235

CodingJeebus wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all newspapers should cite sources. You'd lose a lot of valid sourcing if you made this a requirement. For example, the Catholic Church scandal investigation would never have seen the light of day if the key legal sources corroborating the story had to give up their identity as part of the process. Speaking off the record is often where a lot of those kinds of stories come together. And the reaction around the worl…

You can say "an anonymous source". That's a standard journalistic practice. What shouldn't be standard is "we read this newspaper article and we're going to repeat it as if we originated the story". Which is what AI news always is, in addition to the vast majority of news outlets. The origin of most news is wire services, repeating what local reporters write. Newspapers usually at least cite the wire service. Blogs,…

Post by groovy2shoes » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

direwolf20 wrote: post #27

xnorswap wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could do more harm than good. Like how California's bylaw about cancer warnings are useless because it makes it look like everything is known to the state of California to cause cancer, which in turn makes people just ignore and tune-out the warnings because they're not actually delivering signal-to-noise. This in turn harms people when they think, "How bad can tobacco be? Even my Aloe Vera plant has a warning l…

Imagine selling a product with the tagline: "Unlike Pepsi, ours doesn't cause cancer."