The amount of “all artists will use AI to pretend to make stuff, because money” is honestly kinda bizarre, and completely misunderstands the motivations of most artists, writers and makers.
Maybe sometimes. But rarely. Usually value is in the actual stuff.
But that's not how laws work. In this case, a judge would set some standards, like "would a reasonable person be confused by this", and would rule based on that. It won't matter overly much what the author thinks "anyone could see," but it's also not an entirely objective process with code-like rules. That's just not how most laws work.
I found this definition here :
> ... who use an AI system to generate or manipulate image, audio or video content that appreciably resembles existing persons, objects, places, entities or events and would falsely appear to a person to be authentic or truthful (deep fakes)
> ‘AI system’ means a machine-based system that is designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment, and that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments
To me, this definition reads as only including "agentic" uses, or automated decision engines. An image generator does not operate with any autonomy. If you interpret the "input" part loosely enough to include it, then you'd likely include old and simple techniques like seam carving [1], which very few would consider "AI" in the contemporary sense
If you're talking about twitter, then yeah, that's a firehose of crap and there's no laws that'll stop the "owww, it was just a joke!"
Most of the media you see in the near future (if not already) is going to be at least AI assisted. They're going to be overloaded by reports of AI generation not labeled as AI.
I'm also curious, what about AI assisted media? If a company writes a full article, then uses AI to edit it a bit, does that need to be labeled?
As for AI assisted edits, the article is quite clear about the labelling covering AI generated content. If you "hire" the AI as an editor by asking it to check your grammar or point out weak arguments, then do the rewrite yourself, it almost certainly wouldn't be covered. It sounds like it wouldn't be covered if you asked it to apply edits for style either, just be sure to log the changes since it would clearly be in an AI's voice.
Sure, but this mandate means that if they're caught (which isn't unlikely), they can be fined up to 3% of revenue (not profit). Many will be outside the EU's jurisdiction, but not all. Taken together, this will have a chilling effect, not stopping it entirely, but likely reducing it.
Maybe. But the rest of your post doesn't have anything to back this up.
> I'm also curious, what about AI assisted media? If a company writes a full article, then uses AI to edit it a bit, does that need to be labeled?
Why would it? The threat is mass generation of articles without any human oversights, and realistic looking images claiming occurrence of events that never hapened. Nobody cares about an AI typo and stylecheck.
Tangent: it is notable that certain variations of labelling of that sort would now be considered unacceptable by many:
https://web.archive.org.au/awa/20240617043532oe_/https://blo...
.. and ..
> and let them decide
Isn't it naive thinking ?
The entire problem is fraud, and governments are hardly immune from that.
"Let the customer verify if the car airbags were installed properly, and decide if they trust it.
"Let the customer verify if the plant that produced the plastic in their grocery bags is dumping its waste products in the water nearby, and decide if they trust it."
No.
We have governments and regulations for a reason. It is utterly unreasonable to expect customers to verify everything themselves. We need clear, firm labeling laws for all kinds of products. There's no reason this should be different.
Hard to assess what this rule will actually accomplish. Ultimately AI will be involved in all creative processes going forward, so all pieces of media will have at least some basic AI disclaimer. At the same time, the bad actors that the EU is so paranoid about (Russians secretly undermining our democracy and other boogeymen) will obviously not use the label.
But it's another tool in the EU's toolkit to arbitrarily enforce fines on big tech when politically convenient, of course. That's one thing we remain good at.
With enough money you can already buy attention and presence. Now you can even facilitate a fake discourse to claim legitimacy and steer manipulation into entirely new realms. If this is not counteracted not only will rogue nations destroy democracies even faster, but powerful corporations and rich individuals will also use this to increase their power further and damage simple consumers.
Nothing about this concerns any creative process.
1: It gives legal leverage against vectors of misinformation. Misinformation is tricky to combat legally and this is a first obvious measure that can be taken.
2: Reputation will become more important in the future, and if you are found to have repeatedly posted AI content claiming it is not it will damage you. Not to mention that users can point out the obvious discrepancy.
What on earth makes you think that? Do you honestly think that literally all creatives will just start making lazy crap because… it’s cool? Because I can assure you, outside of this little corner of the internet, it very much is not.
Proper authors, journalists and artists are, generally, not keen.
Don't be stupid enough to let machines do your own thinking, treat them as a dishwasher.
Though honestly, still probably skip the LLM if you’ve any pride in your work; LLM-‘assisted’ docs are generally worse than those written by people.
You are still responsible for your work. What is important are the semantics and statements of the text. Less so how the exact arrangement of letters came to be.
"Even I - with all my years of experience and knowledge - fell into the trap of hallucinations. I summarised reports using AI tools and worked from those summaries, trusting they were accurate.
He used an LLM to perform research instead of using it as a mere writing tool. I think large language models are great at formatting text, formatting, structuring and giving a stylecheck. But the last pass and review must always be a human. Everything posted by an LLM under your name is still under your name and you are liable for every single word. It's about the outcome and everybody who uses it is responsible for it.
The AI Scotsman fallacy.
Also, like… why do you think people write books or make art? In the vast, vast majority of cases it is not to make money (virtually none of them do). It’s to _make_ something. Where’s the feeling of accomplishment in making them if you just told an LLM to shit something out? Like, who would bother?
I'm not sure if I'm using the right term here, but publishers have been using rotating ghost writers to write series for generations and many of the authors have been happy to translate outlines into books just to earn a living. (I know of ghost written series that my father read as a child. I'm by no means young, and he had children late in life before it became fashionable to wait to have children until they were older.)
> In the vast, vast majority of cases it is not to make money (virtually none of them do).
If you're suggesting that virtually no authors write books to make money, I would suggest that is not true and the landscape is going to change for the worse. There are constraints on how many authors write books purely to make money because writing takes time and effort, with the returns being notoriously low. AI eliminates the time and effort factor. Returns don't have to be high if it is being generated by a content mill. If anything, diluting the market will result in lower returns for human authors -- discouraging them from writing in the first place.
This isn’t _really_ a thing. If you’re into writing for the money, you’re probably in the wrong business. Even some quite successful/popular authors have a day job; only a very few can support themselves on it.
That said, real people write for all sorts of reasons. Money is definitely one of them. Sometimes it is out of ignorance (e.g. they don't know that few books earn much money). Sometimes it is out of delusion (e.g. some authors are clearly raking in the money, they think they will too).
Exactly. Find something else to do.
From this perspective the mere existence of AI tools for this stuff devalues all competing possible results, whether the tools are used or not, simply because there will be so much possible everything (media wise) on demand to match the whims of any consumer so they lose interest.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj/eng
I feel like this should be linked in any discussion of any legal matter
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40313769
I do wish more people used basic watermarks on their media regardless - as in sloppy ffmpeg text. People are more likely to repurpose other people's older media than generate new media, and old time-y watermarks make that just slightly harder. Maybe a free app for uploading citizen journalism media that handles the watermarking with geo- and datemarking is the way to go.
I even think that it might not need a mandate, if camera manufacturers start making it as a marketing claim. Prove your work is authentic and not AI generated!
- law doesn't play "wording nitpicking", "Simon said" or similar nonsense. And this applies here, too.
- law doesn't care about what you or any "specific" person thinks something means/looks.
i.e. if you ask 1000 random people if something "looks authentic" and more then a very very small fractions says it is "authentic looking" then it is authentic looking (idk. what "more then a very small fraction" is, but 10% is definitely more)
Honestly any honest interpretation of "do you try or thing a random person from the street might mistake it as authentic (based on the _looks_, not content)" is giving you a pretty good idea for what it means. (honest here == not definition nitpicking, not egocentric, not elitist, not defaultist, etc. )
But also most relevant:
_This (authentic looking) is the wording of the article not the law/regulation._
This is mostly about content which tries to manipulate people with deep fakes.
And stuff like it being clear if e.g. a AI backed voice translation was used, as there had been more then one or two cases of voice translations being wrong in a way you would attribute to malice for a human translator.
E.g. Ai generated voice overs putting
Unlabeled doesn’t mean safe or legit.
No, people still smoke, drink and fornicate, despite all the labels.
At some point, we should just let Brother Darwin sort out the thinking ones from the non-thinking ones, because at a too aggressive level of protection, society will stop working, and people will regress to children.
> Participants drew on a range of risk discourses in framing their abstention or moderate drinking along the lines of health, wellness, wisdom and productivity. They reiterated social constructions of heavy or regular alcohol use as irresponsible, threatening and potentially addictive.
This way of thinking is a very efficient way of destroying your culture and civilisation.
Consciously labelling something as genuine / non AI incorrectly is fraud.
"Forgetting" to add an AI label is an error of omission.
Feels like the former is far more punishable than the latter.
For many years we've been aware that edited models on magazine covers, Instagram and in ads are negatively impacting the well-being of (young) people, but we've never done anything about that. I consider this regulation incredibly hypocritical and full on populist because 'AI BAD!' and nothing else.
Here are the rules: https://www.forbrukertilsynet.no/vi-jobber-med/merking-av-re... Quite level headed and easy to follow. So no, editing contrast or whatever people think they're clever to point out doesn't count.
I'm not trolling. I'm thinking about how you practically define what you are proposing to regulate.
If that's all... If anything, it's lenient for AI. You can still spread all the mind poison you want, you just need to label it.
> full on populist
It's not populist. That's just a cheap frame.
See these:
- https://www.instagram.com/p/DTDKbhflVRO/ - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg8wvz427vo#:~:text=Accor...
And many, many examples in day to day reporting.
I'd rather have the laywork already there to punish sensationalist publishers that abuse AI to forge alternate realities than nothing.
Manipulating information is going to be the plague of the post-GPT/post-Midjourney era. We are entering an era where trust if going to be hard earned, and I don't know how you can trust for-profit or politician/billionaire owned companies anymore. What prevents WaPo from manufacturing information?
Can you manually create images that were done via AI? Of course you can.
Can you create AI fake content and misinformation as easily with human labor as you can with AI? No.
Understanding this distinction answers whether you see the implications AI has on the future of democracies or not.
What about Photoshop being driven by Claude Cowork? That my seem asinine, but it is a serious consideration
I found this definition here [1]
> ‘AI system’ means a machine-based system that is designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment, and that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments;
But that barely clears anything up. Even worse, I would not include a simple user-prompted image generator under this definition, as it is not operating with any autonomy. Or, you interpret it so broadly that seam carving [2] is considered AI, let alone content-aware fill
Ensuring democracy by selectively censoring. I feel safer already.
I better put AI label on every video I make as there is already AI in the supply chain of all the tech I use. All content contains AI now.
Let's talk about AI commissars who will decide which company will survive. In fact, let's create a few an NGOs to help! NGO will tell commissar what he wants to hear, NGO will get rewarded and allowed to exist!
I doubt EU will survive the next decade or two without major crisis or war tbh.
Edit: Instead of downvoting, how about you try retorting? I don't think I'm incorrect here. But maybe I am!
Look, there's a ton of places where you can display your AI code, products or comments. Why is it so damn important that no places remain for people who want to be aware of whether or not they are engaging with a human?
Why is it so important to you that users must not be aware?
Even the most ardent AI booster wants their slop to be viewed by human eyeballs, ironically.
Authentic voices are today being drowned in waves upon waves of AI slop spam. This is not quite censorship but the end effect is similar - human voice cannot be heard. Just this time not because someone stopped the human from talking, but because they as shouting 1000x louder instead, at pennies on the dollar it costs to create something truly valuable.
The same way I look at food labels to support local produce and those who don't try to trick me into thinking I am consuming something it's really not.
I personally wouldn't care for AI usage in icons, I don't put a lot of attention to them. Someone else might.
Well, okay, I am not sure how much effort goes into creating your typical stock photo, probably not a lot, just still more than 0 effort it takes for the AI to generate it.
And yes, I see difference between an automated system flooding the web with AI generated "news" in disguise vs a niche blogger using AI to iterate on an image with hand crafted prompts. Labels are not perfect, just better than nothing.
(I also think that labels will quickly become just "background noise" that is mostly ignored.)
there is also nothing selectively about it, it applies to all deep fake equally
if you had read the article you would know that this is mainly about deep fakes and other deceptive content, not every use of an AI tool (e.g. line smoothing) requires an AI label, specifically it's only about content "generative AI" usage _in a context where it's potentially deceptive_.
> AI commissars who will decide which company will survive
a huge jump in logic not related to anything in this article
> I doubt EU will survive the next decade or two without major crisis or war tbh.
again unrelated, but any country which doesn't fights deep fake propaganda will most likely not survive as a democratic state of law, soo if anything this action increases the chance of survival
> Edit: Instead of downvoting, how about you try retorting?
- then maybe read the article properly, your comments put it highly in question you did
- also maybe don't have non logically sustained jumps in reasoning in your article, especially not when you jumps in reasoning come with tons of sarcasm
> I don't think I'm incorrect here. But maybe I am!
well yes, you have even missed the long known, explicitly pointed out sever threat deep fake propaganda is for any state and especially democracies. That is not a good bases for any argument.
Also passive aggressive edits are a good way to get even more down votes if anything.
Content label doesn't transform the content. It just provides a false sense of category.
I still have to think critically whether there is a label or not.
Cons: New ways for sociopaths for corruption, embezzlement and censorship.
That is my point.
This idea that legislation has no downsides is extremely naive and borderline retarded. Look at proposed legislation from the point of someone who wants to destroy everything. Does it provide a path to that goal? Is the risk worth it?
Every government grows over time and produces more and more suffering while consuming more and more wealth. I recommend reading The Gulag Archipelago. Your thinking seems to be dangerously naive to you and people around you.
Legacy media uses the argument that consumer already expects to be lied to and knows the content is for entertainment (TV news for example). I feel the same about AI content.
Or should I be expected to blindly trust everything? I already have to critically think and filter everything already so why the distinction? I should try harder for some content and not another? Especially as AI gets better the distinction between AI and no-AI generated content gets blurrier.
All I see is bureaucrats trying to grab more power over people's decisions and more money embezzled. Unelected people forcing rules on their subjects.
It's easy to take yourself out of this equation, but it only makes everything worse. The trick is that they make you think that it couldn't get worse. But this is always false.
With definition of nihilism along the lines of `the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless`
The point I am making (or trying to) is quite the opposite. Bureaucrats seem to be introducing more violence and even more problems while resolving none. I still have to critically about the content I consume regardless of it having some label. But now tax money goes towards this instead of the things citizens voted for.
As long as it's privately or voluntarily funded and no violence or coercion is used, then I don't really care.