Should Bots Be Required To Tell You That They're Not Human? (buzzfeednews.com)

"BuzzFeed has this story about proposals to make social media bots identify themselves as fake people," writes an anonymous Slashdot reader. "[It's] based on a paper by a law professor and a fellow researcher." From the report: General concerns about the ethical implications of misleading people with convincingly humanlike bots, as well as specific concerns about the extensive use of bots in the 2016 election, have led many to call for rules regulating the manner in which bots interact with the world. "An AI system must clearly disclose that it is not human," the president of the Allen Institute on Artificial Intelligence, hardly a Luddite, argued in the New York Times. Legislators in California and elsewhere have taken up such calls. SB-1001, a bill that comfortably passed the California Senate, would effectively require bots to disclose that they are not people in many settings. Sen. Dianne Feinstein has introduced a similar bill for consideration in the United States Senate.

In our essay, we outline several principles for regulating bot speech. Free from the formal limits of the First Amendment, online platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have more leeway to regulate automated misbehavior. These platforms may be better positioned to address bots' unique and systematic impacts. Browser extensions, platform settings, and other tools could be used to filter or minimize undesirable bot speech more effectively and without requiring government intervention that could potentially run afoul of the First Amendment. A better role for government might be to hold platforms accountable for doing too little to address legitimate societal concerns over automated speech. [A]ny regulatory effort to domesticate the problem of bots must be sensitive to free speech concerns and justified in reference to the harms bots present. Blanket calls for bot disclosure to date lack the subtlety needed to address bot speech effectively without raising the specter of censorship.

Comments

Can I talk to a robot, please?

[petes_PoV]

When talking to a remote voice on the end of a phone at a call centre, it makes little difference whether that voice belongs to a person or a machine. They both behave "robotically" - working their way through a script and only having a certain number of pre-approved responses to questions.

And further, when we take the next step of having the 'bot on my phone handling all incoming calls and making outgoing ones to call centres, it would make the process much slicker when it is 'bot-to-'bot.

As for being required to inform people they aren't human, I would also like human callers demonstrate that they have more skills and abilities than a bot. If they can't, then what is the point of them?