I don't think any of you are ready for how Chinese the internet needs to become. They already have this.
AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, unlike the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals, which involves consciousness and emotionality. The distinction between the former and the latter categories is often revealed by the acronym chosen.
No, mostly because I'm against laws which are literally impossible to enforce. And it'll become exponentially harder to enforce as the years pass on.
I think a lot of people will get annoyed at this comparison, but I see a lot of similarity between the attitudes of the "AI slop" people and the "We can always tell" anti-trans people, in the sense that I've seen so many people from the first group accuse legitimate human works of being AI-created (and obviously we've all seen how often people from the second group have accused AFAB women of being trans). And just as those anti-trans people actually can't tell for a huge number of well-passing trans people, there's a lot of AI-created works out there that are absolutely passing for human-created works in mass, without giving off any obvious "slop" signs. Real people will get (and are getting) swept-up and hurt in this anti-AI reactionary phase.
I think AI has a lot of legitimately decent uses, and I think it has a lot of stupid-as-shit uses. And the stupid-as-shit uses may be in the lead for the moment. But mandating tagging AI-generated content would just be ineffective and reactionary. I do think it should be regulated in other, more useful ways.
what other, more useful ways?
I definitely agree with this. If this does not happen then I can at the very least see the journalism industry develop its own opt-in standard for image signing.
I'm not against such a law in theory, but I have many questions about how it would be implemented and enforced. First off, what exactly counts as AI generated? We are seeing more and more that AI features are being added into lots of areas, and I could certainly envision a future in few years time that nearly all photos taken with high end phones would be altered by AI in some way. After that, who exactly is responsible for ensuring that things are tagged properly? The individual who created the image? The software that may have done the AI processing? The social media site that the image was posted on? If the penalties are harsh for not attributing ai to an image, what's to stop sites from just having a blanket disclaimer saying that ALL images on the page were generated by AI?
If the penalties are harsh for not attributing ai to an image, what’s to stop sites from just having a blanket disclaimer saying that ALL images on the page were generated by AI?
Just like what happens with companies slapping Prop. 65 warnings on products that don't actually need them, out of caution and/or ignorance
Regarding your last point, you could in theory also penalize for marking non AI generated images as AI generated.
Legally mandating watermarks on any AI generated watermarks is a bad idea.
It's good practice for these companies to add a watermark, but when you add a "legal" requirement, you're opening up regular artists/authors to getting dragged through the legal system simply because someone (or some corporation) suspects that an AI tool was used at some point in the work's creation.
watermark would help me to stop reading and real and actual expert on the matter
No, just legislate that all AI companies have to publish every single source they used for their training models and proof they have permissions/licenses to do so. If its later shown that they used a source and didnt list it, they can be fined & sued for a % of the companies revenue.
Then all the copyright holders of those sources then sue the AI companies for infringement/retrospective licenses.
Yes 100%
Yup. There should also be a law requiring all photography, specifically of people, that have been altered/photoshopped to be tagged to remind us that the beauty standards that are being shoved down our throats are unrealistic.
Na, we should strive to be perfect.
How would such a law be enforced? What agency would enforce it? What penalty would one face for breaking this law?
Force the AI models to contain some kind of metadata in all their material. Training AI models is a massive undertaking, it's not like they can hide what they're doing. We know who is training these models and where their data centers are, so a regulatory agency would certainly be able to force them to comply.
In the US this could be done with the FCC, in other countries the power can be invested into regulatory bodies that control communications and broadcasting etc.
The penalty? Break them on the fucking wheel.
yes, the ones you pay for and are the publicly scrutinized might. Privately trained models just, you know, won't
If they can find cannabis grow ops from power usage, they certainly can find people using massive amounts of data and processing power and public water and investor cash to train AI. You expect me to believe this could be done in secret?
Yes.
Using AI models and playing 3D games both use the same hardware and electricity. You can run an LLM or a diffusion model on a home computer, and many do. Is someone going to show up with a clipboard, and demand to see your Steam account?
Training AI models is completely different, though. That requires massive amounts of compute and data and electricity and water, and that's all very easy for the government to track.
If someone trains an open source AI model to fingerprint its output, someone else can use abliteration or other methods to defeat that. It will not require re-training. An example of this is deepseek-r1's "1776" variant, where someone uncensored it, and now it will talk freely about Tiananmen Square.
Even without that, it's not practical for a government to find all instances of model training. Thousands of people can rent the same GPUs in the same data centers. A small organization training one model can have the same power consumption as a large organization running inference. It would take advanced surveillance to get around that.
It's also becoming possible to train larger and larger models without needing a data center at all. nVidia is coming out with a 128GB desktop machine that delivers 1 petaflop @ FP4 for 170 watts. FP8 would be on the order of hundreds of teraflops. Ten of them could talk over an InfiniBand switch. You could run that setup in an apartment, or in a LAN closet.
It's practical for a government to regulate Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, etc. Who cares if they can't catch everything? Focusing on the biggest problems is perfectly fine imo, the worst offenders are the biggest companies as usual.
Your company's AI model got retrained and used in a way that violates regulations? Whelp, looks like your company is liable for that. Oh, that wasn't done by your company or anyone involved? Too fucking bad, should have made it harder to retrain your model.
~~And if they resist, break them on the fucking wheel.~~
You act like it's impossible and so we shouldn't even try, which is honestly just an anti regulation talking point that is trotted out for literally everything.
Medieval torture in response to what is essentially copyright infringement. Very sane!
Or just nationalize their companies I guess.
Well that's certainly less extreme than breaking on the wheel, I'll give you that, but it doesn't seem very realistic in most countries, where nationalization is rare and done mainly for strategic purposes.
Well the most realistic thing is that there will be no regulations or if there are regulations they're toothless fines or something.
I didn't realize we were limiting ourselves to our backwards political system where the rich and powerful write their own regulations.
Nothing will be done, realistically.
Nothing is ever done about anything.
I gather from your username that you consider yourself a communist? How do you suppose your ambitions could be put into reality when the movement is so devastatingly weak and disorganized?
Things only look that way when you're a Western Marxist and reject actually existing socialism around the world. China is hardly weak or disorganized.
Or do you mean AI regulation? I think it's probably best to just focus on AI being used for war and struggle against that (No Tech For Apartheid comes to mind), rather than try and tackle all AI everywhere all at once.
To be clear I am not a socialist or communist, Western or otherwise. Yes, China is ascendent on the world stage and likely will continue to be, but they have shown no willingness to aid communist movements abroad. That can change of course but it would seem to me that the CPC is more concerned with maintaining international relationships and economic agreements than fomenting the global revolution. I also somewhat doubt the party's commitment to eventually 'withering away' as Marx put it. To be fair, I know that couldn't happen unless the whole world was on board or they'd get promptly steamrolled by one adversary or another.
China's commitment to peaceful internal development certainly means they won't help revolutionary communism abroad directly, at least for now, but they still raise the contractions. Normal people will look at their growing economy and compare it to our stagnant economy and become agitated.
And then there's BRICS destroying the reserve currency status of the US dollar and bringing about a multipolar world.
Closer to home, there's the internal decline of the US that will soon make it impossible for it to meddle in countries with socialist and anticolonial movements. Imagine a world where the US couldn't kill leaders like Sukarno or Lumumba or Allende, nor could it invade Korea or Vietnam. It will try, of course, but the age of hegemony is over.
That's the future I see, and it makes me optimistic.
Quite off topic for an AI thread, though!
Hell no. There's ZERO reason. Any case you can put forth for why it would be needed is already covered by current slander, libel, defamation of character, copyright, etc laws. The only remaining ones are puritan "it's not real art" reasons, and frankly those are just gatekeeping assholes.
I wonder how long people are going to keep perseverating over AI generated content...
Until they can no longer tell, slide into completely baseless vibes based identification and them most people will just bore and move on and small but vocally online group of tinhat equivalents will base their entire personality on "tracking" the AI
that sounds about right, so in a year or two most people will finally be able to move on then :)