A new bill in New York would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content
niemanlab.org276 points by giuliomagnifico 5 hours ago
276 points by giuliomagnifico 5 hours ago
I'm surprised to see so little coverage of AI legislation news here tbh. Maybe there's an apathy and exhaustion to it. But if you're developing AI stuff, you need to keep on top of this. This is a pretty pivotal moment. NY has been busy with RAISE (frontier AI safety protocols, audits, incident reporting), S8420A (must disclose AI-generated performers in ads), GBL Article 47 (crisis detection & disclaimers for AI chatbots), S7676B (protects performers from unauthorized AI likenesses), NYC LL144 (bias audits for AI hiring tools), SAFE for Kids Act [pending] (restricts algorithmic feeds for minors). At least three of those are relevant even if your app only _serves_ people in NY. It doesn't matter where you're based. That's just one US state's laws on AI.
It's kinda funny the oft-held animosity towards EU's heavy-handed regulations when navigating US state law is a complete minefield of its own.
> I'm surprised to see so little coverage of AI legislation news here tbh.
Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced.
But I actually believe they'll be. In the worst way possible: honest players will be punished disproportionally.
> Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced.
Time will tell. Texas' sat on its biometric data act quite quietly then hammered meta with a $1.4B settlement 20 years after the bill's enactment. Once these laws are enacted, they lay quietly until someone has a big enough bone to pick with someone else. There are already many traumatic events occurring downstream from slapdash AI development.
Meta made $60B in Q4 2025. A one-time $1.4B fine, 20 years after enactment, is not "getting hammered".
That's even worse, because then it's not really a law, it's a license for political persecution of anyone disfavored by whoever happens to be in power.
How about a pop-up on websites, next to the tracking cookie ones, to consent reading AI generated text?
I see a bright future for the internet
Yeah it’s like that episode of schoolhouse rock about how a bill becomes a law now takes place in squid games.
> Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced.
That’s because they can’t be.
People assume they’ve already figured out how AI behaves and that they can just mandate specific "proper" ways to use it.
The reality is that AI companies and users are going to keep refining these tools until they're indistinguishable from human work whenever they want them to be.
Even if the models still make mistakes, the idea that you can just ban AI from certain settings is a fantasy because there’s no technical way to actually guarantee enforcement.
You’re essentially passing laws that only apply to people who volunteer to follow them, because once someone decides to hide their AI use, you won't be able to prove it anyway.
> the idea that you can just ban AI from certain settings is a fantasy because there’s no technical way to actually guarantee enforcement.
By that token bans on illegal drugs are fantasy. Whereas in fact, enforcement doesn't need to be guaranteed to be effective.
There may be little technical means to distinguish at the moment. But could that have something to do with lack of motivation? Let's see how many "AI" $$$ suddenly become available to this once this law provides the incentive.
> By that token bans on illegal drugs are fantasy.
I think you have this exactly right. They are mostly enforced against the poor and political enemies.
> passing laws that only apply to people who volunteer to follow them
That's a concerning lens to view regulations. Obviously true, but for all laws. Regulations don't apply to only to what would be immediately observable offenses.
There are lots of bad actors and instances where the law is ignored because getting caught isn't likely. Those are conspiracies! They get harder to maintain with more people involved and the reason for whistle-blower protections.
VW's Dieselgate[1] comes to mind albeit via measurable discrepancy. Maybe Enron or WorldCom (via Cynthia Cooper) [2] is a better example.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCI_Inc.#Accounting_scandals
> You’re essentially passing laws that only apply to people who volunteer to follow them . .
Like every law passed forever (not quite but you get the picture!) [1]
The idea that you can just ban drinking and driving is a fantasy because there’s no technical way to actually guarantee enforcement.
I know that sounds ridiculous but it kind of illustrates the problem with your logic. We don’t just write laws that are guaranteed to have 100% compliance and/or 100% successful enforcement. If that were the case, we’d have way fewer laws and little need for courts/a broader judicial system.
The goal is getting most AI companies to comply and making sure that most of those that don’t follow the law face sufficient punishment to discourage them (and others). Additionally, you use that opportunity to undo what damage you can, be it restitution or otherwise for those negatively impacted.
And you can easily prompt your way out of the typical LLM style. “Written in the style of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”
No, that doesn't really work so well. A lot of the LLM style hallmarks are still present when you ask them to write in another style, so a good quantitative linguist can find them: https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/pyo0xs3k/release/2
That was with GPT4, but my own work with other LLMs show they have very distinctive styles even if you specifically prompt them with a chunk of human text to imitate. I think instruction-tuning with tasks like summarization predisposes them to certain grammatical structures, so their output is always more information-dense and formal than humans.
C2PA-enabled cameras (Sony Alpha range, Leica, and the Google Pixel 10) sign the digital images they record.
So legislators, should they so choose, could demand source material be recorded on C2PA enabled cameras and produce the original recordings on demand.
Indistinguishable, no. Not these tools.
Without emotion, without love and hate and fear and struggle, only a pale imitation of the human voice is or will be possible.
What does that look like? Can you describe your worst case scenario?
Worst case? Armed officers entering your home without warrant, taking away your GPU card?
They can do that anyway. What does that have to do with the content of the proposed law?
Who are the honest players generating AI slop articles
The ones honestly labelling their articles e.g. "AI can make mistakes". Full marks to Google web search for leading the way!
Don't ding the amusingly scoped animosity, it's very convenient: we get to say stuff like "Sure, our laws may keep us at the mercy of big corps unlike these other people, BUT..." and have a ready rationalization for why our side is actually still superior when you look at it. Imagine what would happen if the populace figured it's getting collectively shafted in a way others may not.
>Imagine what would happen if the populace figured it's getting collectively shafted in a way others may not.
They already believe that and it’s used to keep us fighting each other.
Ai view from Simmons+simmons is a very good newsletter on the topic of ai regulation https://www.simmons-simmons.com/en/publications/clptn86e8002...
All video and other contests should have ai stamp as most of the YouTube is AI generated.Almost like memes
~Everything will use AI at some point. This is like requiring a disclaimer for using Javascript back when it was introduced. It's unfortunate but I think ultimately a losing battle.
Plus if you want to mandate it, hidden markers (stenography) to verify which model generated the text so people can independently verify if articles were written by humans (emitted directly by the model) is probably the only feasible way. But its not like humans are impartial anyway already when writing news so I don't even see the point of that.
It would make sense to have a more general law about accountability for the contents of news. If news is significantly misleading or plagiarizing, it shouldn’t matter if it is due to the use of AI or not, the human editorship should be liable in either case.
This is a concept at least in some EU countries, that there has to always be one person responsible in terms of press law for what is being published.
If a news person in the USA publishes something that's actually criminal, the the corporate veil can be pierced. If the editor printed CSAM they would be in prison lickity split. Unless they have close connections to the executive.
Most regulations around disclaimers in the USA are just civil and the corporate veil won't be pierced.
I agree with that the most. That's why I added the bit about humans. In the end if what you're writing is not sourced properly or too biased it shouldn't matter if AI is involved or not. The truth is more the thing that matters with news.
> I'm surprised to see so little coverage of AI legislation news here tbh.
I think the reason is that most people don't believe, at least on sufficiently long times scales, that legacy states are likely to be able to shape AI (or for that matter, the internet). The legitimacy of the US state appears to be in a sort of free-fall, for example.
It takes a long time to fully (or even mostly) understand the various machinations of legislative action (let alone executive discretion, and then judicial interpretation), and in that time, regardless of what happens in various capitol buildings, the tests pass and the code runs - for better and for worse.
And even amidst a diversity of views/assessments of the future of the state, there seems to be near consensus regarding the underlying impetus: obviously humans and AI are distinct, and hearing the news from a human, particular a human with a strong web-of-trust connection in your local society, is massively more credible. What's not clear is whether states have a role to play in lending clarity to the situation, or whether that will happen of the internet's accord.
I've begun an AI content disclosure working group at W3C if folks are interested in helping to craft a standard that allows websites to voluntarily disclose the degree to which AI was involved in creating all or part of the page. That would enable publishers to be compliant with this law as well as the EU AI Act's Article 50.
Ideally, trying to pass anything AI-generated as human-made content would be illegal, not just news, but it's a good start.
That could do more harm than good.
Like how California's bylaw about cancer warnings are useless because it makes it look like everything is known to the state of California to cause cancer, which in turn makes people just ignore and tune-out the warnings because they're not actually delivering signal-to-noise. This in turn harms people when they think, "How bad can tobacco be? Even my Aloe Vera plant has a warning label".
Keep it to generated news articles, and people might pay more attention to them.
Don't let the AI lobby insist on anything that's touched an LLM getting labelled, because if it gets slapped on anything that's even passed through a spell-checker or saved in Notepad ( somehow this is contaminated, lol ), then it'll become a useless warning.
It is worse, even less than useless. With the California case, there is very little go gain by lying and not putting a sticker on items that should have one. With AI generated content, as the models get to the point we can't tell anymore if it is fake, there are plenty of reasons to pass off a fake as real, and conditioning people to expect an AI warning will make them more likely to fall for content that ignores this law and doesn't label itself.
Imagine selling a product with the tagline: "Unlike Pepsi, ours doesn't cause cancer."
What does that mean though? Photos taken using mobile camera apps are processed using AI. Many Photoshop tools now use AI.
How do we know what’s AI-generated vs. sloppy human work? Of course in some situations it is obvious (e.g., video), but text? Audio?
And of course you can even ask AI to add some "human sloppiness" as part of the prompt (spelling mistakes, run-on sentences, or whatever).
> Ideally, trying to pass anything AI-generated as human-made content would be illegal, not just news, but it's a good start.
Does photoshop fall under this category?
Spell check, autocomplete, grammar editing, A-B tests for bylines and photo use, related stories, viewers also read, tag generation
I guess you have to disclose every single item on your new site that does anything like this. Any byte that touches a stochastic process is tainted forever.
Where we put the line within AI-generate vs AI-assisted (aka Photoshop and other tools)?
Please no. I don’t want that kind of future. It’s going to be California cancer warnings all over again.
I don’t like AI slop but this kind of legislation does nothing. Look at the low quality garbage that already exists, do we really need another step in the flow to catch if it’s AI?
You legislate these problems away.
New York also wants 3d printers to know when they are printing gun parts. Sure these initiatives have good meanings but also would only work when "the good ones" chose to label their content as AI generated/gun parts. There will _never_ be a 100% sure fire, non invasive, way to know if an article was (in part) AI generated or not, the same way that "2d printers" (lol) refuse to photo copy fiat currency, to circle back to the 3d printer argument.
IMO: it's already too late and effort should instead be focussed on recognition of this and quickly moving on to prevention through education instead of trying to smother it with legislation, it is just not going away.
I'm worried that this will lead to a Prop 65 [0] situation, where eventually everything gets flagged as having used AI in some form. Unless it suddenly becomes a premium feature to have 100% human written articles, but are people really going to pay for that?
> substantially composed, authored, or created through the use of generative artificial intelligence
The lawyers are gonna have a field day with this one. This wording makes it seem like you could do light editing and proof-reading without disclosing that you used AI to help with that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65
At least it would be possible to autofilter everything out. Maybe market will somehow make it possible for non-AI content to get some spotlight because of that.
> I'm worried that this will lead to a Prop 65 [0] situation, where eventually everything gets flagged as having used AI in some form.
This is very predictably what's going to happen, and it will be just as useless as Prop 65 or the EU cookie laws or any other mandatory disclaimers.
The EU ePrivacy directive isn’t about disclaimers.
The problem is people believe it is. People believe the advertisement industry narrative they are force to show the insane screens and have to make it difficult. Yet they are not, and a reject all must be as easy as accept all (and "legitimate reasons" do not exist, they are either allowed uses and you don't have to ask or they are not).
How is that useless? You adding the warning tells me everything I need to know.
Either you generated it with AI, in which case I can happily skip it, or you _don't know_ if AI was used, in which case you clearly don't care about what you produce, and I can skip it.
The only concern then is people who use AI and don't apply this warning, but given how easy it is to identify AI generated materials you just have to have a good '1-strike' rule and be judicious with the ban hammer.
Because you have to be able to prove it wasn't AI when the law is tested, and keeping records and proof you didn't use AI is going to be really difficult, if at all possible. For little people having fun, unless you poke the wrong bear, it won't matter. But for companies who are constantly the target of lawsuits, expect there to be a new field of unlabeled AI trolling comparable to patent trolling or similar.
We already see this with the California label, it get's applied to things that don't cause cancer because putting the label on is much cheaper than going through to the process to prove that some random thing doesn't cause cancer.
If the government showed up and claimed your comment was AI generated and you had to prove otherwise, how would you?
I think a lot of people are asking the question around many digital services; I'm pretty sure in areas like education and media "no AI!" is going to be something that rich people look for, sure.
Editing and proofreading are "substantial" elements of authorship. Hope these laws include criminal penalties for "it's not just this - it's that!" "we seized Tony Dokoupil's computer and found Grammarly installed," right, straight to jail
I can see this ending up like prop65 warnings. Every website will have in the footer "this website may contain content known to the state of New York to be AI generated"
Step 2: outlets slap this disclaimer on all content, regardless of AI usage, making it useless
Step 3: regulator prohibits putting label on content that is not AI generated
Step 4: outlets make sure to use AI for all content
Let's call it the "Sesame effect"
This would be an improvement in my book.
I'm a data journalist, and I use AI in some of my work (data processing, classification, OCR, etc.). I always disclose it in a "Methodology" section in the story. I wouldn't trust any reporting that didn't disclose the use of AI, and if an outlet slapped a disclaimer on their entire site, I wouldn't trust that outlet.
Or
Step 1: those outlets that actually do the work see an increase in subscribers.
Alternative timeline
Step 2.5: 'unlike those news outlets, all our work is verified by humans'
Step 3: work as intended.
> In addition, the bill contains language that requires news organizations to create safeguards that protect confidential material — mainly, information about sources — from being accessed by AI technologies.
So clawdbot may become a legal risk in New York, even if it doesn't generate copy.
And you can't use AI to help evaluate which data AI is forbidden to see, so you can't use AI over unknown content. This little side-proposal could drastically limit the scope of AI usefulness over all, especially as the idea of data forbidden to AI tech expands to other confidential material.
This seems like common sense. I'm running OpenClaw with GLM-4.6V as an experiment. I'm allowing my friends to talk to it using WhatsApp.
Even though it has been instructed to maintain privacy between people who talk to it, it constantly divulges information from private chats, gets confused about who is talking to it, and so on.^ Of course, a stronger model would be less likely to screw up, but this is an intrinsic issue with LLMs that can't be fully solved.
Reporters absolutely should not run an instance of OpenClaw and provide it with information about sources.
^: Just to be clear, the people talking to it understand that they cannot divulge any actual private information to it.
They need to enforce this with very large fines.
Broad, ambiguous language like 'substantially composed by AI' will trigger overcompliance rendering disclosures meaningless, but maybe that was the plan.
How about instead of calling Claude a clanker again, which he can't control, how about we give everyone a fair shot this time with a bill that requires the news to not suck in the first place.
What happens if I use linear regression on a chart? Where does one draw the line on "AI"?
Obviously people mean LLMs these days when talking about AI. Don't be obtuse.
Finnish public broadcasting company YLE has same rule. Even if they do cleanups of still images, they need to mark that article has AI generated content.
Do they find that fewer people read articles that were written by humans but have that label slapped on for the photo vs a baseline?
If not: I suspect fewer people may care and so what's the point of the label?
If so: why would they continue to use Ai solely to clean up photos?
Why limit this to news? Equally deserving of protection is e.g. opinion.
This is a good idea. Although most AI written content is also stroll pretty obvious. It consistently has a certain feel that just seems off.
Maybe for articles... and people who seem to think copy pasting a basic gpt response to generate a linkedin lunatic style post is passing anyone familiar with AI generated responses sniff tests...
But i wouldn't be surprised to see a massive % of comments that I don't instantly attribute to AI, actually being AI. RP prompts are just so powerful, and even my local mediocore model coulda wrote 100 comments in the time its taking me to write this one.
all humans are pattern seeking to a fault, the amount of people even in this community that will not consider something AI generated just because it doesnt have emdashes or emojis is probably pretty high.
> Although most AI written content is also stroll pretty obvious. It consistently has a certain feel that just seems off.
I think you're saying "AI" written content having a certain feel that just seems off is obviously "AI" written content.
Yes. But you've know way of knowing that's most. There could be 10x more that we don't detect.
You might as well place it next to the © 2026, on the bottom every page.
Oregon kind of already has this they just don't enforce their laws.
Oregon and New York both are still trying to work their way up the 'rule of law' pyramid past the base level of stopping fetnanyl and meth heads from robbing convenience stores and parked cars. Every moment spent on enforcing AI disclaimers instead is an affront to the populace.
Federal level would be the best, but this is a start.
AI Generated or News? You can't have both.
We've seen this movie - see California prop 65 warnings on literally every building.
It also doesn't work to penalize fraudulent warnings - they simply include a harmless bit of AI to remain in compliance.
> It also doesn't work to penalize fraudulent warnings
How would you classify fraudulent warnings? "Hey chatgpt, does this text look good to you? LGTM. Ship it".
That's the equivalent of having a disclaimer "This article was written using MS Word". Utterly useless in this day and age
In 10-20 years all this AI disclaimer stuff is going to be like 'don't use wikipedia, it could lie!'
Status Quo Bias is a real thing, and we are seeing those people in meltdown with the world changing around them. They think avoiding AI, putting disclaimers on it, etc... will matter. But they aren't being rational, they are being emotional.
The economic value is too high to stop and the cat is out of the bag with 400B models on local computers.
I don't think that's true. The 'this battle is already over' attitude is the most defeatist strategy possible. It's effectively complying in advance, rolling over before you've attempted to create the best possible outcome.
With that attitude we would not have voting, human rights (for what they're worth these days), unions, a prohibition on slavery and tons of other things we take for granted every day.
I'm sure AI has its place but to see it assume the guise of human output without any kind of differentiating factor has so many downsides that it is worth trying to curb the excesses. And news articles in particular should be free from hallucinations because they in turn will cause others to pass those on. Obviously with the quality of some publications you could argue that that is an improvement but it wasn't always so and a free and capable press is a precious thing.
> With that attitude we would not have voting, human rights (for what they're worth these days), unions, a prohibition on slavery and tons of other things we take for granted every day.
None of these things were rolling back a technology. History shows that technology is a ratchet, the only way to get rid of a technology is social collapse or surplanting the technology with something even more useful or at the very least approximately as useful but safer.
Once a technology has proliferated, it's a fiat accompli. You can regulate the technology but turning the clock back isn't going to happen.
AI-written articles tend to be far more regurgitative, lower in value, and easier to ghostwrite with intent to manipulate the narrative.
Economic value or not, AI-generated content should be labeled, and trying to pass it as human-written should be illegal, regardless of how used to AI content people do or don't become.
My theory is that AI writes the way it does because it was trained on a lot of modern (organic) journalism.
So many words to say so little, just so they can put ads between every paragraph.
That is low quality articles in general. Have you never seen how hundreds of news sites will regurgitate the same story of another. This was happening long before AI. High quality AI written articles will still be high value.
Did you go on grokipedia at release? I still sometimes loose myself reading stuff on Wikipedia, I guarantee you that this can't happen on grok, so much noise between facts it's hard to enjoy.
Yes I did go immediately on release. I was finally able to correct articles that have been inaccurate on Wikipedia for years.
Current AI use is heavily subsidized; we will see how much value there actually is when it comes time to monetize.
Emotional my ass, just have websites and social media give me a filter to hide AI stuff , I can't enjoy a video , post or story anymore since I always doubt it is real, if I am part of a minority this filter should not hit the budget of companies and would encourage real people generated content if we are larger then a dozen people.
> But they aren't being rational, they are being emotional.
When your mind is so fried on slop that you start to write like one.
> The economic value is too high to stop and the cat is out of the bag with 400B models on local computers.
Look at all this value created like *checks notes* scam ads, apps that undress women and teenage girls, tech bros jerking each other off on twitter, flooding open source with tsunami of low quality slop, inflating chip prices, thousands are cut off in cost savings and dozens more.
Cat is out of the bag for sure.
You may not like it, but this is what peak economic performance looks like.
LOL! As if human-generated news content is any more honest or accurate...
So literally every article will be labeled as AI assisted and it will be meaningless.
>The use of generative artificial intelligence systems shall not result in: (i) discharge, displacement or loss of position
Being able to fire employees is a great use of AI and should not be restricted.
> or (ii) transfer of existing duties and functions previously performed by employees or worker
Is this saying you can't replace an employee's responsibilities with AI? No wonder the article says it is getting union support.
> So literally every article will be labeled as AI assisted and it will be meaningless.
The web novel website RoyalRoad has two different tags that stories can/should add: AI-Assisted and AI-Generated.
Their policy: https://www.royalroad.com/blog/57/royal-road-ai-text-policy
> In this policy, we are going to separate the use of AI for text, into 3 categories: General Assistive Technologies, AI-Assisted, AI-Generated
The first category does not require tagging the story, only the other two do.
> The new tags are as such:
> AI-Assisted: The author has used an AI tool for editing or proofreading. The story thus reflects the author’s creativity and structure, but it may use the AI’s voice and tone. There may be some negligible amount of snippets generated by AI.
> AI-Generated: The story was generated using an AI tool; the author prompted and directed the process, and edited the result.
> So literally every article will be labeled as AI assisted and it will be meaningless.
That at might at least offer an opportunity for a news source to compete on not being AI-generated. I would personally be willing to pay for information sources that exclude AI-generated content.
How would you feel if an AI hallucinated and fired you from your job?
I would feel that I must not have been documenting my value as good as I could have been and would try and do so better at my next job.