I wouldn't want humans pretending to be bots, for a variety of reasons.
It would be so embarrassing if your AI Girlfriend / Boyfriend turned out to be real.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/02/06/the-vast-sophis... https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/02/06/online-scams-m...
It might work in more limited contexts, like commercial speech.
I don't have an opinion yet, but I can't think of a specific reason to object to that (other than a default preference for honesty). Could you give an example or two?
In other words, people, generally, cherrypick evidence for their opinions, rather than picking opinions for their evidence.
A good sign this is occuring is when the reasons provided are vague, the prevalence of that negative outcome is rare, or are hypothetical scenarios which rely on companies or people behaving in unlikely and unnatural ways (like ignoring broader incentives).
The result is luddite-ism, and proposals exactly like this one, whereby regulations are proposed even in the absence meaningful and demonstrable harm.
The differences are just implementation details (i.e. whether the transistors are carbon or silicon based).
Your statement attempts to give an impression of a middle ground, but what it actually does is delegating the action to the human - who has limited energy and has to make hundreds of other decisions.
Your statement sounds like what a lobbyist might whisper to a regulator in an attempt to effectively neuter the bill.
People not versed in technology do not - and do not have to - know what an LLM is or what it can do.
These matters need be resolved at the source and we must not allow hopeful libertarian technologist DDoS the whole society.
Should bread come with disclaimers that it harvesters were used to collect the wheat, or machines were used to mix the dough? Maybe we can add disclosures to books that were made on a printing press rather than hand typed on a typewriter?
If you come into contact with a dough mixer, it should be clear that it's a dough mixer.
But if you come into a contact with a book, I imagine you might have trouble recognizing it.
Society almost never differentiates between goods and services produced directly by human hands, versus with the aid of tools.
This is objectively wrong. "Handmade" is an incredibly common marketing keyword slapped on all sorts of products to imply quality.
There's no law requiring manufacturers to identify hand made versus machine made, and often, there aren't even clear definitions for what hand made means.
>Society almost never differentiates between goods and services produced directly by human hands
Sure we do. We all have different expectations of a human service vs. Using a tool for something. Self checkout, for example. Or a robotaxi vs an Uber driver. Humans themselves can be a service and that can affect how we want to pay or approach one.
Luddites should be ignored because they are alarmist, and care not for whether their concerns are warranted or necessary, much like Californian politicians.
This is a terrible suggestion because it ignores the fact that these bots are helping humans do human tasks, and allows for discrimination against useful tools. It’s deaccelerationist, and that’s a bad thing.
It’s akin to requiring manufacturers to disclose whether a product is hand made or whether machines were used to reduce the need for humans to do repetitive manual labour.
Also, keep in mind that it’s only the good well behaved useful bots that will honour this. The bots that are used to help humans achieve nefarious goals will simply continue to pretend to be human.
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.
Let's go off this lens... why is this bad?
>The bots that are used to help humans achieve nefarious goals will simply continue to pretend to be human.
Good. Now I can catch them, report them, and CA can fine them. Again, I don't see the downside. I like good, helpful bots. Them being bots don't make them less helpful (on the contrary. It's nice knowing they can be available 24/7).
The parent comment isn't talking about race, they are talking about discriminating between human and human tool (bot).
For bots specifically, many bots try to pass themselves off as human because the people that created them know that that lie matters. There's room for debate about what's the best specific policy but the mere fact that bots so often try to pass themselves off as human is their creators admitting that it's important.
A bit farther away both end up being the same — “using automation to make executives insanely rich”.
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 down