Good law, still missing a big point

Both parts of the NY state legislature have passed a clear and well-written bill to constrain Altman.

The human side was crafted by the writers and actors unions, who know what they’re talking about. The technical side also shows unusual clarity, which makes me curious about the source of the expertise.

On the human side:

Artificial intelligence can quickly generate articles, summaries, news scripts, audio/visual and other media content that may seem professionally done to a lay observer. However, there is ample evidence that content created by generative artificial intelligence: (a) contains false or misleading content; and (b) plagiarizes by deriving its content from original source material without permission or proper citation.

On the tech side:

“Generative artificial intelligence” means a class of artificial intelligence models that are self-supervised and emulate the structure and characteristics of input data to generate derived synthetic content, including, but not limited to, images, videos, audio, text, and other digital content.

I especially like emulate the structure and characteristics of input data. This captures the essence of Altman’s machine.

The law requires a clear statement at the top or beginning of material, and provides a hefty penalty for failing to add the statement. There’s an exception for “content eligible for copyright”: If the content is eligible for copyright registration such disclosure requirement shall not apply. I guess this makes sense. Only material that WASN’T stolen can be eligible for copyright. If it’s eligible, it wasn’t plagiarized so it’s not a problem. Still, the exception sounds like a loophole to me.

The announcement itself resembles the old FCC radio requirement to distinguish recorded material from live drama and music. If the records occupied more than a small part of the hour, the announcer had to say something like “the following program is mechanically transcribed”.

What’s missing is actual accountability as in ACCOUNTING and LEDGERS. If the material was stolen, the thieves should pay. A more complete law would require licensing arrangements before using the Altman product.