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

newyorker.com

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

#41

Post by burfog »

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?

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

#42

Post by p1necone »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #24
floatingatoll wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) No, proofreading is not authorship. 2,3,4) A judge could reasonably find that you were attempting to circumvent the law and declare all of these as “bot”. The judicial system will not specify in writing complete coverage for every loophole. Judges can, regardless, find you guilty.

> 1) No, proofreading is not authorship. It is when the substitution is both context-aware and not what you intended to write. > 2,3,4) A judge could reasonably find that you were attempting to circumvent the law and declare all of these as “bot”. Wait, so if someone sends you a question and the suggestions can detect from the context your answer, you're a bot because you chose the suggestion instead of typing out wo…

You could pick apart basically the entire body of US law like this if you wanted to. As other people have mentioned the legal system just doesn't work like this - context and intent are taken into account and judges and lawyers are not mindless robots reading a script.

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

#43

Post by luckylion »

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.

AliExpress does this as well and in an annoying manner that I consider insulting. Support chat will start with a useless bot that just looks for keywords and then replies with FAQ links. "Escalate to a service agent" will make you wait for 30-45 seconds to then be greeted by "Anna" or some other human name. It's another bot, with typing-delay and will follow a simple script to keep you busy, low quality and no apparent option to actually get to a human support agent.

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

#44

Post by inopinatus »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #24
floatingatoll wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) No, proofreading is not authorship. 2,3,4) A judge could reasonably find that you were attempting to circumvent the law and declare all of these as “bot”. The judicial system will not specify in writing complete coverage for every loophole. Judges can, regardless, find you guilty.

> 1) No, proofreading is not authorship. It is when the substitution is both context-aware and not what you intended to write. > 2,3,4) A judge could reasonably find that you were attempting to circumvent the law and declare all of these as “bot”. Wait, so if someone sends you a question and the suggestions can detect from the context your answer, you're a bot because you chose the suggestion instead of typing out wo…

The law is not a programming language.

Believing so is a common misconception amongst engineers, but depending on it as such is likely to lead to disappointment, frustration, anger, needless bickering, extended conflict, and vexatiously long, hard to read, and mostly unenforceable contracts.

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

#45

Post by AnthonyMouse »

p1necone wrote: post #42
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) No, proofreading is not authorship. It is when the substitution is both context-aware and not what you intended to write. > 2,3,4) A judge could reasonably find that you were attempting to circumvent the law and declare all of these as “bot”. Wait, so if someone sends you a question and the suggestions can detect from the context your answer, you're a bot because you chose the suggestion instead of typing out wo…

You could pick apart basically the entire body of US law like this if you wanted to. As other people have mentioned the legal system just doesn't work like this - context and intent are taken into account and judges and lawyers are not mindless robots reading a script.

That's the excuse used by everyone in support of ambiguous legislation. "All we need is a law that says bad people go to jail and judges are smart people who can figure out what that means based on context and intent."

Ignoring predictable ambiguities to be resolved by the subjective whims of the judiciary is not the rule of law, and the fact that it regularly happens doesn't change that or make it right.

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

#46

Post by pluma »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #24
floatingatoll wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) No, proofreading is not authorship. 2,3,4) A judge could reasonably find that you were attempting to circumvent the law and declare all of these as “bot”. The judicial system will not specify in writing complete coverage for every loophole. Judges can, regardless, find you guilty.

> 1) No, proofreading is not authorship. It is when the substitution is both context-aware and not what you intended to write. > 2,3,4) A judge could reasonably find that you were attempting to circumvent the law and declare all of these as “bot”. Wait, so if someone sends you a question and the suggestions can detect from the context your answer, you're a bot because you chose the suggestion instead of typing out wo…

Your complaint seems to boil down to "if the law is so imprecise and open to interpretation, how am I supposed to game the system?". Well, this may be a surprise to some people here but the law is not intended as a system to be gamed.

Loopholes are just day 0 exploits of the legal system.

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

#47

Post by floatingatoll »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #39
floatingatoll wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assistive texting is covered in a separate reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360152 The law clearly targets automated content creation that is not declared as such, not assistive writing technologies, and this will be considered by the judicial system when evaluating your stated intentions and actual actions. If you are unable to predict with confidence the outcome of your intentions and actions as t…

> The law clearly targets automated content creation that is not declared as such, not assistive writing technologies How are those two different things? In each case it's a machine generating and suggesting things that you may want to write. Presumably in the second case the suggestions would have to be more sophisticated in order to be coherent most of the time, but that still doesn't really give you any useful cri…

They are different by your intended use of the tool and whether the work is judged to be authored by you or by the tool, not by some specific aspect of technology or implementation.

Do you intend to prepare your thoughts as written word, and you use technology to write those thoughts rapidly? Then that’s probably fine.

Do you intend to prepare written works written by algorithm, software, or technology, to a degree that the work can no longer be reasonably considered the creative output of a tool-assisted human and is now instead the creative output of a human-assisted tool? Then that’s probably not fine.

If you want another way to look at this problem, imagine that our society grants algorithms copyright over the works they produce with our assistance, while granting us copyright of the works we produce with the assistance of algorithms, and that the law demands all algorithms be credited (CC-AT) when their copyrighted works are republished by humans. Copyright law has significant experience studying the problems of entangled and commingled ownership of works, but it’s too soon for US society to grant copyright to algorithms over their works, and so this law is all we get today.

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

#48

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#49

Post by taneq »

dmix wrote: post #32
floatingatoll wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) No, proofreading is not authorship. 2,3,4) A judge could reasonably find that you were attempting to circumvent the law and declare all of these as “bot”. The judicial system will not specify in writing complete coverage for every loophole. Judges can, regardless, find you guilty.

Cool, you get to defend your bot in court. But don’t worry you’ll win!

Or does your bot defend itself in court and you just press the 'submit' button each time it makes a statement?!

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

#50

Post by AnthonyMouse »

floatingatoll wrote: post #47
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The law clearly targets automated content creation that is not declared as such, not assistive writing technologies How are those two different things? In each case it's a machine generating and suggesting things that you may want to write. Presumably in the second case the suggestions would have to be more sophisticated in order to be coherent most of the time, but that still doesn't really give you any useful cri…

They are different by your intended use of the tool and whether the work is judged to be authored by you or by the tool, not by some specific aspect of technology or implementation. Do you intend to prepare your thoughts as written word, and you use technology to write those thoughts rapidly? Then that’s probably fine. Do you intend to prepare written works written by algorithm, software, or technology, to a degree t…

You're still not providing any meaningful distinction between the two. How do you actually distinguish between a tool-assisted human and a human-assisted tool? What's the test and where is that written in the legislation?

> If you want another way to look at this problem, imagine that out society grants algorithms copyright over the works they produce with our assistance, while granting us copyright of the works we produce with the assistance of algorithms, and that the law demands all algorithms be credited (CC-AT) when their copyrighted works are republished by humans.

That's just restating the question, not answering it. And the hairy mess used for copyright is not a very promising thing to aspire to.

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