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.
I don't like the opposite any more though, i.e. commercial food being effectively limited to the lowest common denominator of allergens and other dietary as well as religious restrictions. I see that happen a lot more than this one example and it doesn't even need any laws to cause it.
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.
People know what it _should_ mean, but if you say that it’s fine to have an AI editor, then there will be a bunch of people saying something like “my reporting is that x is a story, and my editor, ChatGPT, just tidied that idea up into a full story”. There’s all sorts of hoops people can jump through like that. So you end up putting a banner on all AI, or only penalizing the honest people who follow the distinction that’s supposed to exist.
Fair enough, but my main response to that is that people need to support independent journalism. It's entirely possible I'm paying some fraud(s), but as someone who certainly spends more than the average person on online journalism, I trust the people I support at the very least know that putting their byline on an AI written article would be a career destroying scandal in the eyes of their current audience.
I'm fine with that. I want neither AI-hallucinated stories nor AI-expanded fluff. If it's not worth it for a real human editor it's probably not worth reading.
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.
If you don't notice then it was probably not something you considered essential. Breaking the tracking of you and your personal information is kind of the point.
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_
Also even if there's a prop 65 warning because there are cancer-causing ingredients, those ingredients may not be user-accessible or may be in tiny enough quantities that they'd statistically never result in cancer even with lifetime use by every human on the planet. E.g. lead in a circuit board inside an IP-68 rated sealed device would require a prop 65 warning even though it won't pose any cancer risk to the user unless they grind up the device & ingest or inhale the lead.
But that is because the requirement is binary - warning vs. no warning. This problem doesn't happen if the requirement is to disclose what was used although it could still lead to other issues.
I don't know of anyone (seriously not one person) who actually believes those labels. And the reason why is precisely because the government was foolish enough to put them on everything under the sun. Now nobody listens to them because the seriousness got diluted.
