The problem isn't the "real" artists, it's everyone else.

> There’s value to actually doing stuff.

Maybe sometimes. But rarely. Usually value is in the actual stuff.

I often see this kind of comment on hn. I'm not sure if I'm suffering from confirmation bias, but I do think it's possible that a large proportion of people here think that laws should work like code. What happened is the input, some calculation happens, and the judgment is the output.

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.

Look at the written law.

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)

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj/eng

The law is phrased “real people” which doesnt mean people that exist or are famous but rather people in general. So ai images of people using your product or whatever are real people which have to be labeled.

If anything this an argument _for_ clearly labelling manipulated photos and AI generated depiction of supposedly real life events.

By the effect it has, among other things. Courts take into account whether the stated motive is believable.

If it looks like slop, it’s obviously AI. If it looks like someone actually put some effort into it, or if it looks like “real”, then it needs to be labeled because you wouldn’t know it was AI otherwise?

the law will allow normal broadcast outlets to filter; so some of that will just be the pipeline.

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!"

Smartphone cameras also do a bunch of image processing that can be classified as AI, by default (some more than others). I wish they'd stop doing that, but I'm sure they won't.

I agree it won't work, albeit for an entirely different reason. There has been a shift towards labelling AI generated or AI assisted content by those who aren't attempting to mislead. Those who are attempting to mislead won't.

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.

It could turn out like the California “chemicals present that could cause cancer” that are ubiquitous in California, and therefore not useful as signal.

Speed limits work nonetheless. A few hefty fines and most of it will stop.

> It won't work.

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.

I would hope so.

Skip to the end. Let the consumer verify that the product is the unmodified intention of the entity claiming to have produced it and let them decide if they trust it.

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...

Every website will just add a global label somewhere in the pop-up they already have about cookies.

Label additions done by machines vs those by humans?

I'm surprised by the sentiment.

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.

> Ultimately AI will be involved in all creative processes going forward

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.

I’m pretty sure the big techs get safe harbor in this, otherwise they would have to stop serving up third party content in the EU all together.

People have already tried this with C2PA, and it's not a perfect system. The main problem with these systems is that you risk certifying fake media, which is worse than uncertified fake and real media.

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 don't see how these are contradictory. The battle for reality will only worsen and you likely need multiple failsaves.

This is honestly not a bad idea. And could be done in parallel.

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 isn't code. Intention and context matters. You don't need a precise specification to mandate something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

In general, in EU

- 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

Let’s stop labeling cigarettes are bad, because people will start smoking cigars and think they’re safe.

Unlabeled doesn’t mean safe or legit.

You suggesting the inverse?

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.

If I buy a bottle of, say, white spirits, there’s a warning on it that it’s poison and dangerously flammable. Because that’s the law. Now, there’s nothing _really_ stopping an unscrupulous manufacturer from making a bottle without those warnings. But on balance it still feels preferable to force manufacturers to do it.

In Norway ads already must specify if a person in it has been digitally altered (changed shape, smoothed skin etc). Quite funny with international ads getting these banners plastered over their face. Random example: https://imgur.com/a/t8zT37o (rules for size and contrast)

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.

Where does it stop? Should it include edits with a digital camera? What about black and white?

I'm not trolling. I'm thinking about how you practically define what you are proposing to regulate.

> incredibly hypocritical

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.

AI is capable of generating things that are nearly indiscernible from reality, with almost any input, be it adversarial or other. Photoshop at least involved some manual trimming and lengthy process that couldn't be applied to "literally anything you can thing of".

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?

You completely disregard practical implications.

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.

I am seeing more and more this exact sentiment that is in this comment: "I should be able to bamboozled everyone into thinking I have skills I actually don't have anymore".

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?

Slapping an explicit "I did not put effort into this" label on slop content is not censorship, its quite opposite, it lets people filter out the noise. No human can hope to be able to do this on their own at the scale GPUs can pump out tokens.

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.

requiring deep fakes to be labeled as deep fakes has nothing to do with censorship

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.

Labelling stuff as “this was made by a magic robot” is not censorship. Don’t be silly.

what's the alternative? Let our benevolent techbro oligarch overlords decide what is best for us?