A new bill in New York would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content
niemanlab.orgI'm surprised to see so little coverage of AI legislation news here tbh. Maybe there's an apathy and exhaustion to it. But if you're developing AI stuff, you need to keep on top of this. This is a pretty pivotal moment. NY has been busy with RAISE (frontier AI safety protocols, audits, incident reporting), S8420A (must disclose AI-generated performers in ads), GBL Article 47 (crisis detection & disclaimers for AI chatbots), S7676B (protects performers from unauthorized AI likenesses), NYC LL144 (bias audits for AI hiring tools), SAFE for Kids Act [pending] (restricts algorithmic feeds for minors). At least three of those are relevant even if your app only _serves_ people in NY. It doesn't matter where you're based. That's just one US state's laws on AI.
It's kinda funny the oft-held animosity towards EU's heavy-handed regulations when navigating US state law is a complete minefield of its own.
> I'm surprised to see so little coverage of AI legislation news here tbh.
Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced.
But I actually believe they'll be. In the worst way possible: honest players will be punished disproportionally.
Or it'll end up like California cancer warnings: every news site will put the warning on, just in case, making it worthless.
There just can’t be a way to discriminate on the spectrum from “we use AI to tidy up the spelling and grammar” to “we just asked ChatGPT to write a story on x”, so the disclaimer will make it look like everyone just asked ChatGPT.
>There just can’t be a way to discriminate on the spectrum from “we use AI to tidy up the spelling and grammar” to “we just asked ChatGPT to write a story on x”
Why though? Did the AI play the role of an editor or did it play the role of a reporter seems like a clear distinction to me and likely anyone else familiar enough with how journalism works.
… or the sesame seed labeling law that resulted in sesame seeds being added to everything.
https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc...
Wow, it's always amazing to me how the law of unintended consequences (with capitalistic incentives acting as the Monkey's Paw) strikes everytime some well-intended new law gets passed.
As someone who is allergic to sesame, that is insanely annoying.
I just came across this for the first time. I ordered a precision screw driver kit and it came with a cancer warning on it. I was really taken aback and then learned about this.
Some legislation which sounds good in concept and is well-intended ends up being having little to no positive impact in practice. But it still leaves businesses with ongoing compliance costs/risks, taxpayers footing the bill for an enforcement bureaucracy forever and consumers with either annoying warning interruptions or yet more 'warning message noise'.
It's odd that legislators seem largely incapable of learning from the rich history of past legislative mistakes. Regulation needs to be narrowly targeted, clearly defined and have someone smart actually think through how the real-world will implement complying as well as identifying likely unintended consequences and perverse incentives. Another net improvement would be for any new regs passed to have an automatic sunset provision where they need to be renewed a few years later under a process which makes it easy to revise or relax certain provisions.
Known by the state of cancer to cause California. I do think P65 warnings are pretty useful for the most part jokes aside
Essentially useless if everyone slaps on that label. Kinda like hospital alarm fatigue.
But this just my uninformed opinion, perhaps those that work in the health industry think differently.
Maybe it’s not a fair comparison, but I think it’s been shown that tobacco warnings are effective even though they’re so common to be “fatigued”.
I do believe this is an unfair comparison. With tobacco the warnings are always true, but with prop 65 the product might not contain any cancer causing ingredients, but the warning is there just in case.
It's much easier to tell yourself prop 65 doesn't have to be avoided because "it's probably just there to cover their asses" wile tobacco products have real warnings that definitely mean danger (though there are people who convince themselves otherwise_
Yup. Or like "necessary cookies" that aren't all that necessary when it works just fine without.
Well, they're necessary if you're spying on your visitors.
> Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced.
Time will tell. Texas' sat on its biometric data act quite quietly then hammered meta with a $1.4B settlement 20 years after the bill's enactment. Once these laws are enacted, they lay quietly until someone has a big enough bone to pick with someone else. There are already many traumatic events occurring downstream from slapdash AI development.
That's even worse, because then it's not really a law, it's a license for political persecution of anyone disfavored by whoever happens to be in power.
Never mind the damage that was willfully allowed to happen that the bill was supposed to protect from happening.
Meta made $60B in Q4 2025. A one-time $1.4B fine, 20 years after enactment, is not "getting hammered".
They didn’t make $60B in Q4 2025 in Texas. 1.4B was 100% profit from Texas for years, that a big fine.
You also have to ask "how much is the specific thing in the lawsuit worth to Meta?"
I don't know how much automatically opting everyone in to automatic photo tagging made Meta, but I assume its "less than 100% of their revenue".
Barring the point of contention being integral to the business's revenue model or management of the company being infected with oppositional defiant disorder a lawsuit is just an opportunity for some middle manager + team to get praised for making a revenue-negative change that reduces the risk of future fines.
Work like that is a gold mind; several people will probably get promoted for it.
Big for Texas, not for Meta.
It’s under 5 hours of GDP for Texas. It’s a big fine, but not a huge deal for either party.
> Texas' sat on its biometric data act quite quietly then hammered meta with a $1.4B settlement 20 years after the bill's enactment.
Sounds like ignoring it worked fine for them then.
That sounds like it will be in the courts for ages before Facebook wins on selective prosecution.
How about a pop-up on websites, next to the tracking cookie ones, to consent reading AI generated text?
I see a bright future for the internet
Don’t give the EU any ideas
Yeah it’s like that episode of schoolhouse rock about how a bill becomes a law now takes place in squid games.
Probably worse than that. I can totally see it being weaponized. A media company critic o a particular group or individual being scrutinized and fined. I haven’t looked at any of these laws, but I bet their language gives plenty of room for interpretation and enforcement, perhaps even if you are not generating any content with AI.
> Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced.
That’s because they can’t be.
People assume they’ve already figured out how AI behaves and that they can just mandate specific "proper" ways to use it.
The reality is that AI companies and users are going to keep refining these tools until they're indistinguishable from human work whenever they want them to be.
Even if the models still make mistakes, the idea that you can just ban AI from certain settings is a fantasy because there’s no technical way to actually guarantee enforcement.
You’re essentially passing laws that only apply to people who volunteer to follow them, because once someone decides to hide their AI use, you won't be able to prove it anyway.
> the idea that you can just ban AI from certain settings is a fantasy because there’s no technical way to actually guarantee enforcement.
By that token bans on illegal drugs are fantasy. Whereas in fact, enforcement doesn't need to be guaranteed to be effective.
There may be little technical means to distinguish at the moment. But could that have something to do with lack of motivation? Let's see how many "AI" $$$ suddenly become available to this once this law provides the incentive.
> By that token bans on illegal drugs are fantasy.
I think you have this exactly right. They are mostly enforced against the poor and political enemies.
Well considering how ineffective the War on Drugs has been - is that really a great analogy?
> considering how ineffective the War on Drugs has been
Relative to no war on drugs? Who knows.
Has there ever been a single person who wants an illegal drug that couldn’t get one because it was illegal?
Just a quick Google search g estimates that less than 3% of drugs are intercepted by the government.
Me. There are four I want. All very safe.
I always wanted to try specific two, but first cannot be had in the safest form because of the specific precursor ban, and all of them suffer from an insane (to me) risk of adulteration.
In twenty minutes I could probably find 10 "reputable" shops/markets, but still with 0 guarantee I won't get the specific thing laced with something for strength.
Even if I wanted pot (I don't, I found it repetitive and extremely boring, except for one experience), I would have to grow it myself (stench!) but then.... where I find sane seeds (healthy ratio CBD to THC)?
Similarly, I wouldn't buy the moonshine from someone risking prosecution to make and sell it. It's guaranteed this risk is offset.
So ... I can't get what I want because there's extremely high chance of getting hurt. An example being poisoning with pills sold as mdma - every music festival, multiple people hurt. Not by Molly, by additives.
I’m absolutely positive that someone in your 1st degree or 2nd degree social circle can get you weed if you wanted it.
Sure they can be enforced. Your comment seems to be based on the idea of detecting AI writing from the output. But you can enforce this law based on the way content is created. The same way you can enforce food safety laws from conditions of the kitchen, not the taste of the food. Child labor laws can be enforced. And so on.
Unless you're trying to tell me that writers won't report on their business that's trying to replace them with AI.
> You’re essentially passing laws that only apply to people who volunteer to follow them . .
Like every law passed forever (not quite but you get the picture!) [1]
And you can easily prompt your way out of the typical LLM style. “Written in the style of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”
No, that doesn't really work so well. A lot of the LLM style hallmarks are still present when you ask them to write in another style, so a good quantitative linguist can find them: https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/pyo0xs3k/release/2
That was with GPT4, but my own work with other LLMs show they have very distinctive styles even if you specifically prompt them with a chunk of human text to imitate. I think instruction-tuning with tasks like summarization predisposes them to certain grammatical structures, so their output is always more information-dense and formal than humans.
This still doesn't remove all the slop. You need sampler or fine-tuning tricks for it. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061
> 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 the reason for whistle-blower protections.
VW's Dieselgate[1] comes to mind albeit via measurable discrepancy. Maybe Enron or WorldCom (via Cynthia Cooper) [2] is a better example.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCI_Inc.#Accounting_scandals
C2PA-enabled cameras (Sony Alpha range, Leica, and the Google Pixel 10) sign the digital images they record.
So legislators, should they so choose, could demand source material be recorded on C2PA enabled cameras and produce the original recordings on demand.
The idea that you can just ban drinking and driving is a fantasy because there’s no technical way to actually guarantee enforcement.
I know that sounds ridiculous but it kind of illustrates the problem with your logic. We don’t just write laws that are guaranteed to have 100% compliance and/or 100% successful enforcement. If that were the case, we’d have way fewer laws and little need for courts/a broader judicial system.
The goal is getting most AI companies to comply and making sure that most of those that don’t follow the law face sufficient punishment to discourage them (and others). Additionally, you use that opportunity to undo what damage you can, be it restitution or otherwise for those negatively impacted.
Indistinguishable, no. Not these tools.
Without emotion, without love and hate and fear and struggle, only a pale imitation of the human voice is or will be possible.
What does that look like? Can you describe your worst case scenario?
Highly selective enforcement along partisan lines to suppress dissent. Government officials forcing you to prove that your post is not AI generated if they don't like it. Those same officials claiming that it is AI generated regardless of the facts on the ground to have it removed and you arrested.
If you assume the use of law will be that capricious in general, then any law at all would be considered too dangerous for fear of use as a partisan tool.
Why accuse your enemies of using AI-generated content in posts? Just call them domestic terrorists for violently misleading the public via the content of their posts and send the FBI or DHS after them. A new law or lack thereof changes nothing.
Worst case? Armed officers entering your home without warrant, taking away your GPU card?
They can do that anyway. What does that have to do with the content of the proposed law?
The primary obstacle is discussions like this one. It will be enforced if people insist it's enforced - the power comes from the voters. If a large portion of the population - especially the informed population, represented to some extent here on HN - thinks it's hopeless then it will be. If they believe they will get together to make it succeed, it will. It's that simple: Whatever people believe is the number one determination of outcome. Why do you think so many invest so much in manipulating public opinion?
Many people here love SV hackers who have done the impossible, like Musk. Could you imagine this conversation at an early SpaceX planning meeting? That was a much harder task, requiring inventing new technology and enormous sums of money.
Lots of regulations are enforced and effective. Your food, drugs, highways, airplane flights, etc. are all pretty safe. Voters compelling their representatives is commonplace.
It's right out of psyops to get people to despair - look at messages used by militaries targeted at opposing troops. If those opposing this bill created propaganda, it would look like the comments in this thread.
Who are the honest players generating AI slop articles
The ones honestly labelling their articles e.g. "AI can make mistakes". Full marks to Google web search for leading the way!
>But I actually believe they'll be. In the worst way possible: honest players will be punished disproportionally.
As with everything else BigCo with their legal team will explain to the enforcers why their "right up to the line if not over it" solution is compliant and mediumco and smallco will be the ones getting fined or being forced to waste money staying far from the line or paying a 3rd party to do what bigco's legal team does at cost.
I'll bet AI is going to be simply outlawed for hiring, and possibly algorithmic hiring practices altogether. You can't audit a non-deterministic system unless you train the AI from scratch, which is an expense only the wealthiest companies can take on.
None of those bills/laws involve legislating publishing though. This bill would require a disclaimer on something published. That’s a freedom of speech issue, so it going to be tougher to enforce and keep from getting overturned in the courts. The question here are what are the limits the government can have on what a company publishes, regardless of how the content is generated.
IMO, It’s a much tougher problem (legally) than protecting actors from AI infringement on their likeness. AI services are easier to regulate.. published AI generated content, much more difficult.
The article also mentions efforts by news unions of guilds. This might be a more effective mechanism. If a person/union/guild required members to add a tagline in their content/articles, this would have a similar effect - showing what is and what is not AI content without restricting speech.
> This bill would require a disclaimer on something published. That’s a freedom of speech issue
They can publish all they want, they just have to label it clearly. I don’t see how that is a free speech issue.
Because compelled speech is an insult to free speech just as censored speech is.
How do you feel about the fact that manufacturers need to list the ingredients of the food they sell you?
Is AI-generated text speech?
It is when a human publishes it. Which is why they're also liable for it.
I agree in general and that should be the position but it's probably more nuanced than this in practice: who published it when it's a dev that writes a script that just spits junk into the wild or reinforces someone else's troll-speech?
In general, I think LLM content has been found to not be copyrightable, but it would still speech when it's published. It would be the speech of the company publishing it, not the dev that wrote the script. So, ai-junk-news.com is still publishing some kind of speech, even if it was an LLM that wrote it. At least, that would be my interpretataion.
Don't ding the amusingly scoped animosity, it's very convenient: we get to say stuff like "Sure, our laws may keep us at the mercy of big corps unlike these other people, BUT..." and have a ready rationalization for why our side is actually still superior when you look at it. Imagine what would happen if the populace figured it's getting collectively shafted in a way others may not.
>Imagine what would happen if the populace figured it's getting collectively shafted in a way others may not.
They already believe that and it’s used to keep us fighting each other.
Ai view from Simmons+simmons is a very good newsletter on the topic of ai regulation https://www.simmons-simmons.com/en/publications/clptn86e8002...
All video and other contests should have ai stamp as most of the YouTube is AI generated.Almost like memes
~Everything will use AI at some point. This is like requiring a disclaimer for using Javascript back when it was introduced. It's unfortunate but I think ultimately a losing battle.
Plus if you want to mandate it, hidden markers (stenography) to verify which model generated the text so people can independently verify if articles were written by humans (emitted directly by the model) is probably the only feasible way. But its not like humans are impartial anyway already when writing news so I don't even see the point of that.
It would make sense to have a more general law about accountability for the contents of news. If news is significantly misleading or plagiarizing, it shouldn’t matter if it is due to the use of AI or not, the human editorship should be liable in either case.
This is a concept at least in some EU countries, that there has to always be one person responsible in terms of press law for what is being published.
That's government censorship and it not allowed here, unlike the EU. As for plagiarism, every single major news outlet is guilty of it in basically every single article. Have you ever seen the NYT cite a source?
That would bankrupt every news organisation in the USA.
Seems like a good idea then
If a news person in the USA publishes something that's actually criminal, the the corporate veil can be pierced. If the editor printed CSAM they would be in prison lickity split. Unless they have close connections to the executive.
Most regulations around disclaimers in the USA are just civil and the corporate veil won't be pierced.
I agree with that the most. That's why I added the bit about humans. In the end if what you're writing is not sourced properly or too biased it shouldn't matter if AI is involved or not. The truth is more the thing that matters with news.
> I'm surprised to see so little coverage of AI legislation news here tbh.
I think the reason is that most people don't believe, at least on sufficiently long times scales, that legacy states are likely to be able to shape AI (or for that matter, the internet). The legitimacy of the US state appears to be in a sort of free-fall, for example.
It takes a long time to fully (or even mostly) understand the various machinations of legislative action (let alone executive discretion, and then judicial interpretation), and in that time, regardless of what happens in various capitol buildings, the tests pass and the code runs - for better and for worse.
And even amidst a diversity of views/assessments of the future of the state, there seems to be near consensus regarding the underlying impetus: obviously humans and AI are distinct, and hearing the news from a human, particular a human with a strong web-of-trust connection in your local society, is massively more credible. What's not clear is whether states have a role to play in lending clarity to the situation, or whether that will happen of the internet's accord.
What I'd really like to see is a label on original reporting.
Even beyond AI, the vast majority of news is re-packaging information you got from somewhere else. AI can replace the re-writers, but not the original journalists, people who spoke to primary sources (or who were themselves eyewitnesses).
Any factual document should reference its sources. If not, it should be treated skeptically, regardless of whether AI or a human is doing that.
An article isn't automatically valueless just because it's synthesized. It can focus and contextualize, regardless of whether it's human or AI written. But it should at the very least be able to say "This is the actual fact of the matter", with a link to it. (And if AI has hallucinated the link, that's a huge red flag.)
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 outlets get to hand-wave the “trust me” part even when a piece is basically a lightly rewritten press release, thinly sourced, or reflecting someone’s incentives more than reality.
Well yeah because investigative journalism and original reporting outside of the spectacle of buying a plane ticket to a warzone or weather disaster to the reporter can have a dramatic background is too expensive when people come to you in droves with literally pre-written articles you can rubber stamp and publish.
For example, the Colorado Sun has labels on every story for the nature of reporting that went into it: https://coloradosun.com/
Some may find it surprising that this is left over from the Sun's early support from the crypto journalism project Civil.
Just like we want to know where the food we eat comes from, we want to know where the information comes from. Of course there's the limit of journalists having to keep their sources secret in many cases. But original publisher I think should be possible.
There's already such a label: "exclusive!"
> Any news content created using generative AI must also be reviewed by a human employee “with editorial control” before publication.
To emphasize this: it's important that the organization assume responsibility, just as they would with traditional human-generated 'content'.
What we don't want is for these disclaimers to be used like the disclaimers of tech companies deploying AI: to try to weasel out of responsibility.
"Oh no, it's 'AI', who could have ever foreseen the possibility that it would make stuff up, and lie about it confidently, with terrible effects. Aw, shucks: AI, what can ya do. We only designed and deployed this system, and are totally innocent of any behavior of the system."
Also don't turn this into a compliance theatre game, like we have with information security.
"We paid for these compliance products, and got our certifications, and have our processes, so who ever could have thought we'd be compromised."
(Other than anyone who knows anything about these systems, and knows that the stacks and implementation and processes are mostly a load of performative poo, chosen by people who really don't care about security.)
Hold the news orgs responsible for 'AI' use. The first time a news report wrongly defames someone, or gets someone killed, a good lawsuit should wipe out all their savings on staffing.
We don’t hold the president of the US responsible for spreading AI video and photos as real. Let’s start there and work our way down
I, and I believe many others, do hold him responsible for it.
However, I do not think starting there is a good idea: your progress in other areas would stall until that crook has been dealt with.
Like I’ve said a few times on HN, if you have 10 friends and ask them what they want to eat for dinner and 6 say “let’s go to a Mexican restaurants” and the other four say “let’s kill Bob and eat him”, it still tells you a lot about your friend group. It tells you even more of the person advocating eating Bob is made the leader of your group and decides where you are going to eat dinner for the next four years.
Especially after you have already seen what your friend has already done for four years
Ideally, trying to pass anything AI-generated as human-made content would be illegal, not just news, but it's a good start.
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 label".
Keep it to generated news articles, and people might pay more attention to them.
Don't let the AI lobby insist on anything that's touched an LLM getting labelled, because if it gets slapped on anything that's even passed through a spell-checker or saved in Notepad ( somehow this is contaminated, lol ), then it'll become a useless warning.
> Like how California's bylaw about cancer warnings are useless
Californians have measurably lower concentrations of toxic chemicals than non-California's, so very useless!
> That could do more harm than good.
The downside to having labels on AI-written political comments, stellar reviews of bad products, speeches by a politician, or supposed photos of wonderful holiday destinations in ads targeted at old people are what, exactly?
Are you really arguing that putting a label on AI generated content could do more harm than just leaving it (approximately) indistinguishable from the real thing might somehow be worse?
I'm not arguing that we need to label anything that used gen AI in any capacity, but past the point of e.g. minor edits, yeah, it should be labeled.
None of those AI written political comments will have the label added because it's unprovable, and those propaganda shops are based well outside of the necessary jurisdiction anyway. It will just be a burden on legitimate actors and a way for the government to harass legitimate media outlets that it doesn't like with expensive "AI usage investigations."
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.
It's not even a good argument. Studies have demonstrated it reduces toxic chemicals in the body, and also deters companies from using the toxic chemicals in their products.
> Don't let the AI lobby insist on anything that's touched an LLM getting labelled, because if it gets slapped on anything that's even passed through a spell-checker or saved in Notepad
People have been writing articles without the help of an LLM for decades.
You don't need an LLM for grammar and spell checking, arguably an LLM is less efficient and currently worse at it anyway.
The biggest help a LLM can provide is with research but that is only because search engines have been artificially enshitified these day. But even here the usefulness is very limited because of hallucinations. So you might be better off without.
There is no proof that LLMs can significantly improve the workflow of a professional journalist when it comes to creating high quality content.
So no, don't believe the hype. There will still be enough journalists not using LLMs at all.
Imagine selling a product with the tagline: "Unlike Pepsi, ours doesn't cause cancer."
It is worse, even less than useless. With the California case, there is very little go gain by lying and not putting a sticker on items that should have one. With AI generated content, as the models get to the point we can't tell anymore if it is fake, there are plenty of reasons to pass off a fake as real, and conditioning people to expect an AI warning will make them more likely to fall for content that ignores this law and doesn't label itself.
What does that mean though? Photos taken using mobile camera apps are processed using AI. Many Photoshop tools now use AI.
Obviously it should not apply to anything using machine learning based algorithms in any way, just content made using generative AI, with exceptions for minor applications and/or a separate label for smaller edits.
Publishing is more than just authoring. You have research, drafts, edits, source verification, voice, formatting, multiple edits for different platforms and mediums. Each one of those steps could be done by AI. It's not a single-shot process.
How do we know what’s AI-generated vs. sloppy human work? Of course in some situations it is obvious (e.g., video), but text? Audio?
And of course you can even ask AI to add some "human sloppiness" as part of the prompt (spelling mistakes, run-on sentences, or whatever).
Where we put the line within AI-generate vs AI-assisted (aka Photoshop and other tools)?
> Ideally, trying to pass anything AI-generated as human-made content would be illegal, not just news, but it's a good start.
Does photoshop fall under this category?
Spell check, autocomplete, grammar editing, A-B tests for bylines and photo use, related stories, viewers also read, tag generation
I guess you have to disclose every single item on your new site that does anything like this. Any byte that touches a stochastic process is tainted forever.
None of those things are "AI" (LLMs). We had those things before, we'll have them after.
Please no. I don’t want that kind of future. It’s going to be California cancer warnings all over again.
I don’t like AI slop but this kind of legislation does nothing. Look at the low quality garbage that already exists, do we really need another step in the flow to catch if it’s AI?
You legislate these problems away.
Fully agreed.
Ideally, we would just ban AI content altogether.
I don't think there's any way for that to happen, and IF we could create a solid legislative framework, AI could definitely (at some point in the future) contribute more good than bad to society.
I'm worried that this will lead to a Prop 65 [0] situation, where eventually everything gets flagged as having used AI in some form. Unless it suddenly becomes a premium feature to have 100% human written articles, but are people really going to pay for that?
> substantially composed, authored, or created through the use of generative artificial intelligence
The lawyers are gonna have a field day with this one. This wording makes it seem like you could do light editing and proof-reading without disclosing that you used AI to help with that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65
At least it would be possible to autofilter everything out. Maybe market will somehow make it possible for non-AI content to get some spotlight because of that.
> I'm worried that this will lead to a Prop 65 [0] situation, where eventually everything gets flagged as having used AI in some form.
This is very predictably what's going to happen, and it will be just as useless as Prop 65 or the EU cookie laws or any other mandatory disclaimers.
The EU ePrivacy directive isn’t about disclaimers.
The problem is people believe it is. People believe the advertisement industry narrative they are force to show the insane screens and have to make it difficult. Yet they are not, and a reject all must be as easy as accept all (and "legitimate reasons" do not exist, they are either allowed uses and you don't have to ask or they are not).
Manufacturers also have the choice to avoid carcinogens but they don't.
How is that useless? You adding the warning tells me everything I need to know.
Either you generated it with AI, in which case I can happily skip it, or you _don't know_ if AI was used, in which case you clearly don't care about what you produce, and I can skip it.
The only concern then is people who use AI and don't apply this warning, but given how easy it is to identify AI generated materials you just have to have a good '1-strike' rule and be judicious with the ban hammer.
Because you have to be able to prove it wasn't AI when the law is tested, and keeping records and proof you didn't use AI is going to be really difficult, if at all possible. For little people having fun, unless you poke the wrong bear, it won't matter. But for companies who are constantly the target of lawsuits, expect there to be a new field of unlabeled AI trolling comparable to patent trolling or similar.
We already see this with the California label, it get's applied to things that don't cause cancer because putting the label on is much cheaper than going through to the process to prove that some random thing doesn't cause cancer.
If the government showed up and claimed your comment was AI generated and you had to prove otherwise, how would you?
"One regulation was kinda bad, so we should never regulate anything again."
Good god, this is pathetic. Do you financially gain from AI or do you think it's hard to prove someone didn't use it? Like this is the bare minimum and you're throwing temper tantrums...
The onus will be on the AI companies pushing these wares to follow regulations. If it makes it harder for the end user to use these wares, well too bad so sad.
>"One regulation was kinda bad, so we should never regulate anything again."
Please don't misrepresent what someone says. That does not lead to constructive dialog.
I gave a question challenging a specific way to regulate a specific thing, to indicate it is challenging. This is not the same as dismissing all regulations.
Also, please avoid the personal mentions.
>The onus will be on the AI companies pushing these wares to follow regulations.
That wasn't the challenge. The raised issue isn't AI companies labeling things AI. The given example included them very much following the regulation.
I think a lot of people are asking the question around many digital services; I'm pretty sure in areas like education and media "no AI!" is going to be something that rich people look for, sure.
Editing and proofreading are "substantial" elements of authorship. Hope these laws include criminal penalties for "it's not just this - it's that!" "we seized Tony Dokoupil's computer and found Grammarly installed," right, straight to jail
seems like prop 65 works well
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2025/02/12/...
> The study, published Wednesday in Environmental Science & Technology, found that California’s right-to-know law, also known as Proposition 65, has effectively swayed dozens of companies from using chemicals known to cause cancer, reproductive harm or birth defects.
...
> Researchers interviewed 32 businesses from a variety of sectors including personal care, clothing and health care, concluding that the law has led manufacturers to remove toxic chemicals from their products. And the impact is significant: 78 percent of interviewees said Proposition 65 prompted them to reformulate their ingredients; 81 percent of manufacturers said the law tells them which chemicals to avoid; 69 percent said it promotes transparency about ingredients and the supply chain.
I've begun an AI content disclosure working group at W3C if folks are interested in helping to craft a standard that allows websites to voluntarily disclose the degree to which AI was involved in creating all or part of the page. That would enable publishers to be compliant with this law as well as the EU AI Act's Article 50.
How does one get involved?
New York also wants 3d printers to know when they are printing gun parts. Sure these initiatives have good meanings but also would only work when "the good ones" chose to label their content as AI generated/gun parts. There will _never_ be a 100% sure fire, non invasive, way to know if an article was (in part) AI generated or not, the same way that "2d printers" (lol) refuse to photo copy fiat currency, to circle back to the 3d printer argument.
IMO: it's already too late and effort should instead be focussed on recognition of this and quickly moving on to prevention through education instead of trying to smother it with legislation, it is just not going away.
I can see this ending up like prop65 warnings. Every website will have in the footer "this website may contain content known to the state of New York to be AI generated"
Let's make this a thing if the law passes.
This feels like a symptom of a deeper issue: we’re treating AI outputs as if they’re authoritative when they’re really just single, unaccountable generations. Disclaimers help, but they don’t fix the decision process that produced the content in the first place.
One approach we’ve been exploring is turning high-stakes AI outputs (like news summaries or classifications) into consensus jobs: multiple independent agents submit or vote under explicit policies, with incentives and accountability, and the system resolves the result before anything is published. The goal isn’t “AI is right,” but “this outcome was reached under clear rules and can be audited.”
That kind of structure seems more scalable than adding disclaimers after the fact. We’re experimenting with this idea on an open source CLI at https://consensus.tools if anyone’s interested in the underlying mechanics.
I agree with the sentiment of this, but it makes one major assumption that I don't think will pass muster in the long run: that people generating output care enough themselves to do it "the right way". Many don't and never will.
Low-effort content mills will never, ever care enough to generate more accurate, consensus-based output, especially if it adds complexity and cost to their workflows.
> That kind of structure seems more scalable than adding disclaimers after the fact.
Not if your goal as a business is to churn out slop as fast and cheaply as possible, and a whole lot of online content is like that. A disclaimer is warranted because you cannot force everyone to use the kinds of approaches that you're talking about. A ton of people who either don't know or don't care what they're putting out will inevitably exist.
Step 2: outlets slap this disclaimer on all content, regardless of AI usage, making it useless
Step 3: regulator prohibits putting label on content that is not AI generated
Step 4: outlets make sure to use AI for all content
Let's call it the "Sesame effect"
This would be an improvement in my book.
I'm a data journalist, and I use AI in some of my work (data processing, classification, OCR, etc.). I always disclose it in a "Methodology" section in the story. I wouldn't trust any reporting that didn't disclose the use of AI, and if an outlet slapped a disclaimer on their entire site, I wouldn't trust that outlet.
So every time a reporter researches something and does a Google search and Gemini results pop up now AI use has to be added to the methodology section and basically 100% of all articles have the "AI use" label attached.
Or
Step 1: those outlets that actually do the work see an increase in subscribers.
Alternative timeline
Step 2.5: 'unlike those news outlets, all our work is verified by humans'
Step 3: work as intended.
They need to enforce this with very large fines.
> In addition, the bill contains language that requires news organizations to create safeguards that protect confidential material — mainly, information about sources — from being accessed by AI technologies.
So clawdbot may become a legal risk in New York, even if it doesn't generate copy.
And you can't use AI to help evaluate which data AI is forbidden to see, so you can't use AI over unknown content. This little side-proposal could drastically limit the scope of AI usefulness over all, especially as the idea of data forbidden to AI tech expands to other confidential material.
This seems like common sense. I'm running OpenClaw with GLM-4.6V as an experiment. I'm allowing my friends to talk to it using WhatsApp.
Even though it has been instructed to maintain privacy between people who talk to it, it constantly divulges information from private chats, gets confused about who is talking to it, and so on.^ Of course, a stronger model would be less likely to screw up, but this is an intrinsic issue with LLMs that can't be fully solved.
Reporters absolutely should not run an instance of OpenClaw and provide it with information about sources.
^: Just to be clear, the people talking to it understand that they cannot divulge any actual private information to it.
I support this for the same reason I want scripted reality TV shows to be labeled as such. Anything that claims to be reality but isn't should be clearly marked as such, unless it's obvious from the context.
I'm not convinced that this law, if it passed, would survive a court challenge on First Amendment grounds. U.S. constitutional law generally doesn't look kindly on attempts to regulate journalism.
OTOH any challenge that makes it all the way to the Supreme Court right now has as much chance of being a decision that completely ignores constitutional law as it does being decided based on that.
Broad, ambiguous language like 'substantially composed by AI' will trigger overcompliance rendering disclosures meaningless, but maybe that was the plan.
You might as well place it next to the © 2026, on the bottom every page.
Finnish public broadcasting company YLE has same rule. Even if they do cleanups of still images, they need to mark that article has AI generated content.
Do they find that fewer people read articles that were written by humans but have that label slapped on for the photo vs a baseline?
If not: I suspect fewer people may care and so what's the point of the label?
If so: why would they continue to use Ai solely to clean up photos?
I'm beginning to suspect HN also needs such a bill. Maybe it is not AI content, but so many prominent posts on HN feel like advertising. Perhaps that is the good thing about AI is that it decreases the trust level. Or is that really a good thing?
[Edit: spelling sigh]
Why limit this to news? Equally deserving of protection is e.g. opinion.
How about instead of calling Claude a clanker again, which he can't control, how about we give everyone a fair shot this time with a bill that requires the news to not suck in the first place.
Oregon kind of already has this they just don't enforce their laws.
Oregon and New York both are still trying to work their way up the 'rule of law' pyramid past the base level of stopping fetnanyl and meth heads from robbing convenience stores and parked cars. Every moment spent on enforcing AI disclaimers instead is an affront to the populace.
I'm well aware. I left Oregon 3 weeks ago and live in DC. Junkies spit on your wife and children while the police watch and say "not enough spit landed" and refuse to arrest anyone. When your property is stolen they will look at you like you're crazy for wanting it investigated or recovered. It has a tracker in it and the device says it's in that pile of stolen stuff near those tweakers. Good riddance Oregon!
Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. Oregonians have more personal freedom than almost any other state. Ron Wyden is by far the best sitting senator. It's a remarkably pro-gun state for being so left wing. Just use your tech bro money and live in a suburb. Cheapest weed in America. legalish shrooms. It's harder here than almost anywhere else for cops to fk your life up. Good.
Also it's objectively very low on violent crime, and the problems you talk about are in every PNW city, i.e. SF, Portland, Vancouver (WA), Vancouver (BC), Seattle. They're also the places where all the innovation, including AI (despite the non SF cities hatred for it), is happening.
This is a good idea. Although most AI written content is also stroll pretty obvious. It consistently has a certain feel that just seems off.
Maybe for articles... and people who seem to think copy pasting a basic gpt response to generate a linkedin lunatic style post is passing anyone familiar with AI generated responses sniff tests...
But i wouldn't be surprised to see a massive % of comments that I don't instantly attribute to AI, actually being AI. RP prompts are just so powerful, and even my local mediocore model coulda wrote 100 comments in the time its taking me to write this one.
all humans are pattern seeking to a fault, the amount of people even in this community that will not consider something AI generated just because it doesnt have emdashes or emojis is probably pretty high.
> Although most AI written content is also stroll pretty obvious. It consistently has a certain feel that just seems off.
I think you're saying "AI" written content having a certain feel that just seems off is obviously "AI" written content.
Yes. But you've know way of knowing that's most. There could be 10x more that we don't detect.
What happens if I use linear regression on a chart? Where does one draw the line on "AI"?
Obviously people mean LLMs these days when talking about AI. Don't be obtuse.
This is so dumb. Name literally any problem caused by AI generated content (there are dozens to choose from) and I will explain why this law will make absolutely no impact on that issue.
Now articles from organizations with legitimate journalists and fact checkers like the NYT, WSJ, or the economist will need an “AI generated” badge because they used an AI assistant and they have risk adverse legal departments. This will be gleefully pointed out by every brain dead Twitter conspiracy theorist, Breitbart columnist, 911 truther substack writer, and Russian spam bot as they happily spew unbadged drivel out into the world. Thanks so much New York!
AI doesn’t make bad news content. Complete disregard for objective reality does. I’ll take an ai assisted human that actually cares about truth over an unassisted partisan hooligan every time.
If this is the best our legislatures can come up with we are so utterly fucked…
We've seen this movie - see California prop 65 warnings on literally every building.
It also doesn't work to penalize fraudulent warnings - they simply include a harmless bit of AI to remain in compliance.
The smell of Harbor Freight stores from before prop 65 compared to now indicates that it did work.
> It also doesn't work to penalize fraudulent warnings
How would you classify fraudulent warnings? "Hey chatgpt, does this text look good to you? LGTM. Ship it".
Good.
AI Generated or News? You can't have both.
Federal level would be the best, but this is a start.
That's the equivalent of having a disclaimer "This article was written using MS Word". Utterly useless in this day and age
In 10-20 years all this AI disclaimer stuff is going to be like 'don't use wikipedia, it could lie!'
Status Quo Bias is a real thing, and we are seeing those people in meltdown with the world changing around them. They think avoiding AI, putting disclaimers on it, etc... will matter. But they aren't being rational, they are being emotional.
The economic value is too high to stop and the cat is out of the bag with 400B models on local computers.
I don't think that's true. The 'this battle is already over' attitude is the most defeatist strategy possible. It's effectively complying in advance, rolling over before you've attempted to create the best possible outcome.
With that attitude we would not have voting, human rights (for what they're worth these days), unions, a prohibition on slavery and tons of other things we take for granted every day.
I'm sure AI has its place but to see it assume the guise of human output without any kind of differentiating factor has so many downsides that it is worth trying to curb the excesses. And news articles in particular should be free from hallucinations because they in turn will cause others to pass those on. Obviously with the quality of some publications you could argue that that is an improvement but it wasn't always so and a free and capable press is a precious thing.
> With that attitude we would not have voting, human rights (for what they're worth these days), unions, a prohibition on slavery and tons of other things we take for granted every day.
None of these things were rolling back a technology. History shows that technology is a ratchet, the only way to get rid of a technology is social collapse or surplanting the technology with something even more useful or at the very least approximately as useful but safer.
Once a technology has proliferated, it's a fiat accompli. You can regulate the technology but turning the clock back isn't going to happen.
We have plenty of examples of regulated technology.
And usually the general public does not have a direct stake in the outcome (ok, maybe broadcast spectrum regulation should be mentioned there), but this time they do and given what's at stake it may well be worth trying to define what a good set of possible outcomes would be and how to get there.
As I mentioned above and which TFA is all about, the press for instance could be held to a standard that they have shown they can easily meet in the past.
As I said, technology can be regulated. And this technology will be regulated.
However the technology is nonetheless here to stay, until it's replaced with something better.
Well they aren't free from hallucinations with human authors. Not to long ago there was an outbreak of articles in the "reputable" mainstream press claiming that there was a foiled terrorist plot against the UN which was actually (and obviously) a garden variety SMS fraud operation. Why should I care if it's AI lying to me next time rather than the constant deluge of humans lying to me?
AI-written articles tend to be far more regurgitative, lower in value, and easier to ghostwrite with intent to manipulate the narrative.
Economic value or not, AI-generated content should be labeled, and trying to pass it as human-written should be illegal, regardless of how used to AI content people do or don't become.
My theory is that AI writes the way it does because it was trained on a lot of modern (organic) journalism.
So many words to say so little, just so they can put ads between every paragraph.
That is low quality articles in general. Have you never seen how hundreds of news sites will regurgitate the same story of another. This was happening long before AI. High quality AI written articles will still be high value.
Did you go on grokipedia at release? I still sometimes loose myself reading stuff on Wikipedia, I guarantee you that this can't happen on grok, so much noise between facts it's hard to enjoy.
Yes I did go immediately on release. I was finally able to correct articles that have been inaccurate on Wikipedia for years.
So you noticed how poor the prose was? Really unbearable to read.
I found it fine to read and it handled controversial subjects much better than Wikipedia.
Current AI use is heavily subsidized; we will see how much value there actually is when it comes time to monetize.
Emotional my ass, just have websites and social media give me a filter to hide AI stuff , I can't enjoy a video , post or story anymore since I always doubt it is real, if I am part of a minority this filter should not hit the budget of companies and would encourage real people generated content if we are larger then a dozen people.
> But they aren't being rational, they are being emotional.
When your mind is so fried on slop that you start to write like one.
> The economic value is too high to stop and the cat is out of the bag with 400B models on local computers.
Look at all this value created like *checks notes* scam ads, apps that undress women and teenage girls, tech bros jerking each other off on twitter, flooding open source with tsunami of low quality slop, inflating chip prices, thousands are cut off in cost savings and dozens more.
Cat is out of the bag for sure.
You may not like it, but this is what peak economic performance looks like.
no, this is what massive subsidy looks like
LOL! As if human-generated news content is any more honest or accurate...
So literally every article will be labeled as AI assisted and it will be meaningless.
>The use of generative artificial intelligence systems shall not result in: (i) discharge, displacement or loss of position
Being able to fire employees is a great use of AI and should not be restricted.
> or (ii) transfer of existing duties and functions previously performed by employees or worker
Is this saying you can't replace an employee's responsibilities with AI? No wonder the article says it is getting union support.
> So literally every article will be labeled as AI assisted and it will be meaningless.
The web novel website RoyalRoad has two different tags that stories can/should add: AI-Assisted and AI-Generated.
Their policy: https://www.royalroad.com/blog/57/royal-road-ai-text-policy
> In this policy, we are going to separate the use of AI for text, into 3 categories: General Assistive Technologies, AI-Assisted, AI-Generated
The first category does not require tagging the story, only the other two do.
> The new tags are as such:
> AI-Assisted: The author has used an AI tool for editing or proofreading. The story thus reflects the author’s creativity and structure, but it may use the AI’s voice and tone. There may be some negligible amount of snippets generated by AI.
> AI-Generated: The story was generated using an AI tool; the author prompted and directed the process, and edited the result.
> So literally every article will be labeled as AI assisted and it will be meaningless.
That at might at least offer an opportunity for a news source to compete on not being AI-generated. I would personally be willing to pay for information sources that exclude AI-generated content.
How would you feel if an AI hallucinated and fired you from your job?
I would feel that I must not have been documenting my value as good as I could have been and would try and do so better at my next job.
That's genuinely insane but you're entitled to your opinion.
> Being able to fire employees is a great use of AI and should not be restricted.
Can you elaborate on this?
There is less bias being able to have an AI measure who is being productive and who isn't. Getting signal from AI when measuring performance to know when to fire people will be a valuable signal.
Do you think that LLMs are not biased / less biased than humans?
objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.