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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

#31

Post by cogman10 »

saucymew wrote: post #24
rappatic wrote: post #8

The requirement doesn't kick in until 10 million monthly US users. I don't see why this shouldn't apply to smaller businesses.

Contrarianly, startups should have a little maneuverability to be naughty. Any slight edge against incumbents is directionally sound policy, imho.

I think there's an easy middle ground, 10M is huge. 1k would be much more reasonable. That gives startups more than enough runway to be naughty while also making sure they fix things up before becoming a problem.

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

#34

Post by nine_k »

saucymew wrote: post #24
rappatic wrote: post #8

The requirement doesn't kick in until 10 million monthly US users. I don't see why this shouldn't apply to smaller businesses.

Contrarianly, startups should have a little maneuverability to be naughty. Any slight edge against incumbents is directionally sound policy, imho.

This maneuverability already exists; see the operations of Uber, WeWork, OpenAI, etc.

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

#35

Post by godelski »

rappatic wrote: post #8

The requirement doesn't kick in until 10 million monthly US users. I don't see why this shouldn't apply to smaller businesses.

My understanding is that the requirement is for __platforms__ with 10m+ monthly users. That is, like Twitter but (probably) not Hacker News. And that really it is more that these platforms need to provide an interface in which bots can identify themselves and do a good faith effort in identifying bots

  > Online platforms with over 10 million monthly U.S. visitors would need to ensure bot operators on their services comply with these expanded disclosure rules.
So even if the bot is from a small business, they still must identify themselves as long as they are on a platform like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. This feels reasonable, even if we disagree on a threshold. It doesn't make sense to enforce this for small niche forums. This would put undue burden on small players and similarly be a waste of government resources, especially because any potential damage is, by definition, smaller.

Big players love regulation because it's gatekeeping and they can always step over the gate. But the gate keeps out competition. More specifically, it squashes competition before they can even become good competitors. So I think it definitely is a good idea to regulate in this fashion. Remember that the playing field is always unbalanced, big players can win with worse products because they can leverage their weight.

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

#36

Post by nico »

wongarsu wrote: post #25

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…

Archive links on another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42968477

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

#38

Post by evil-olive »

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 there's a much more bright-line rule - it's illegal, unless you disclose that it's a bot, and as long as you do that, you're fine.

once I was able to load the Veeto page, I noticed there's a "chat" tab with "Ask me anything about this bill! I'll use the bill's text to help answer your questions." - so somewhat ironically it seems like the bill would directly effect this Veeto website as well, because they're using a chatbot of some kind.

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

#39

Post by tbrownaw »

spankalee wrote: post #13
doctorpangloss wrote: post #10

Should PUBG mobile players be told they are winning against bots? Should psychics tell you they cannot really speak for the dead?

> Should psychics tell you they cannot really speak for the dead? Yes?

That really does sound like a useful rule.

/s

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

#40

Post by benatkin »

If they figured out how to enforce this effectively, the role of something like OpenAI’s Operator could end up being played by a human much of the time. Then there would be click farms similar to call centers. Presumably an AI could watch as long as humans were clicking, which could make click farms more viable through real time quality control. This would also be a boon for projects like Worldcoin to verify distinct humans. I’m having trouble coming up with a scenario in which this works well.
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