Caveat Lector

By Gordon Hopkins I have lamented on many occasions what AI (Artificial Intelligence) may do to the news. My big fear, obviously, is that AI chatbots may soon (sooner than any of us think) become the primary source of news. This is a problem for me, personally, because it means I could find myself out of a job. However, a bigger concern, not just for me but for the whole planet, is the idea that the public may soon be learning about what is going on in the world from machines that have no interest in fact-checking.While these days the news media is everybody's favorite whipping post, the truth is, the public needs to know if their taxes are going up or their government leaders are taking bribes or the country is about to go to war. The only way the public finds out about these things is because there are people called journalists who find out about these things and write about them.News without verified facts isn't news. It's just a lot of words strung together. On the other hand, I have opined many times that no one will trust news if they know it was written by AI. If AI content is labeled as such, people won't believe it. They won't even bother to read it.There is no way to stop AI infiltrating the newsroom. It is already happening. The best way to protect people from digital misinformation is to ensure all AI-generated content is labeled.And that brings me to China, a country not exactly known for being open with information.I recently came across an interesting piece in Wired Magazine this morning. For those of you not aware, Wired is a magazine for people who say things like “decentralized digital currency used for encrypted p2p transactions” and think it makes sense. Earlier this month, China’s Cyberspace Administration drafted a new regulation requiring watermarks on AI produced content.I grew up in an era when a watermark was that faint design on a piece of paper, like a check, that you could only see when you held it up to the light. Nowadays, a watermark is any design or pattern on a digital image or video intended to identify ownership and prevent unauthorized duplication. So, theoretically, with such a watermark required, anyone can tell if they're looking at AI or not.China is not the first place to require some sort of labeling of AI content. California and the European Union have similar regulations in place. Of course, as with anything involving the wild west of the internet, the hard part will be enforcement. In this case, China may have the edge over the U.S. Here in the States, internet platforms insist they are not responsible for the content they host. That has been the claim ever since the early days of the internet, when famously litigious writer Harlan Ellison sued America Online (AOL) for allowing users to post copies of his books online, violating his copyright.China, on the other hand, can require those platforms to police its content for AI, and punish that platform if it doesn't comply.So, even if labeling AI becomes mandatory, it doesn't guarantee anything you see, hear or read online is real. Caveat lector (Let the reader beware).

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