this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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AI

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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.

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Should there be a law mandating all AI generated content be tagged? (lemmy.zip)
submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Title, or at least the inverse be encouraged. This has been talked about before, but with how bad things are getting, and how realistic goods ai generated videos are getting, anything feels better than nothing, AI generated watermarks, or metadata can be removed, but thats not the point, the point is deterrence. Immediately all big tech will comply (atleast on the surface for consumer-facing products), and then we will probably see a massive decrease in malicious use of it, people will bypass it, remove watermarks, fix metadata, but the situation should be quite a bit better? I dont see many downsides/

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

I'd rather have us normalize sourcing things, preferably with the whole trace.

Honestly, I don't really care if something has been written by an underpaid intern or by a LLM. I don't think hallucinations are worse than lies and propaganda and these two things are what I want to see fought.

And I think the issue is wrongly framed. Fast forward 5 years (or 5 months, who knows), everyone will have the equivalent of Claude 4 running locally on their phone, and they will ask for news updates on their specific interests to a model who knows what their interlocutor knows in the tone they configured.

"Fucking Putin at it again, this time hit Kiyv with missiles, 50 sent, half went through." and it will know to give you background when you dont have it "Well it turns out that there riots broke up in Nowheretown in France over a new highway project, with a local ecologist group that brought about a thousand militants across Europe to oppose police. Cool clashes videos if you want."

We won't read "news" through generic one-size-fits-all texts, we will be source-hungry and will have agents digest hundreds of pages of raw info into what we need.

Traceability of information will be what matters the most.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I don't think any of you are ready for how Chinese the internet needs to become. They already have this.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

what other, more useful ways?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Regarding your last point, you could in theory also penalize for marking non AI generated images as AI generated.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

watermark would help me to stop reading and real and actual expert on the matter

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

Yes 100%

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago

Na, we should strive to be perfect.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

How would such a law be enforced? What agency would enforce it? What penalty would one face for breaking this law?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

yes, the ones you pay for and are the publicly scrutinized might. Privately trained models just, you know, won't

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What do you mean by "retrain your model"? Retaining it would erase it. It's not practical to prevent adjusting the weights on an open source model because the weights have to be published for it to work at all. Plenty of open source software can be used to do evil things, and isn't regulated on that account. If someone was to sue the developers of Wireshark because it was used to exploit their network, they would be very likely to lose because that software has many legitimate non-criminal uses.

Requiring US commercial vendors to implement fingerprinting would disadvantage them against open source models, and against vendors from other countries (like DeepSeek) who wouldn't comply. A theoretical government could try to do that, but I don't know if it would survive legal challenges. The current US government is very unlikely to try in the first place, so it seems like a moot point for the next few years. After that, I don't know.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

What do you mean by “retrain your model”?

An example of this is deepseek-r1’s “1776” variant, where someone uncensored it, and now it will talk freely about Tiananmen Square.

I guess this is more accurately called "post-training" instead of "re-training" but my point stands.

If it's possible, hold the model's creators responsible.

Requiring US commercial vendors to implement fingerprinting would disadvantage them against open source models, and against vendors from other countries (like DeepSeek) who wouldn’t comply.

China is very willing to regulate AI development. If the US and China would actually cooperate we'd be able to work together to get a handle on this technology and its development. Also, it really looks like the US is the problem. They're the ones who don't want to regulate, they're the ones that don't want to cooperate, and they're the ones with the most problematic companies.

And "open source" models just aren't as problematic as proprietary models. Training a model is still something that requires massive amounts of data, compute, energy, etc etc. The open source models are going to be much smaller and weaker and more specialized and, as a result, less dangerous or in need of regulation anyway.

But I wouldn't cry too hard if commercial vendors all failed and were replaced with open source, so if open source really can out compete then I welcome it. That seems like a really good side effect of regulating the commercial vendors!

The current US government is very unlikely to try in the first place

Well if we're limiting ourselves to what is likely, nothing will happen.

There will never be any regulations, they won't even try.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Medieval torture in response to what is essentially copyright infringement. Very sane!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Or just nationalize their companies I guess.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I wonder how long people are going to keep perseverating over AI generated content...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

that sounds about right, so in a year or two most people will finally be able to move on then :)