As much as I like open source software, I do not think that these kinds of bills are legitimate even for closed source software.

Is the source code already available?

2006: user generated content is a revolution! We are now exchanging information and ideas directly with each other without needing information gatekeepers like traditional media or paid advertisers or anything like that! The future is gonna be a utopia where the powerful will be challenged at every turn!

2026: a significant percentage of “user generated content” is generated either by AI or people who are being paid to do so for commercial or political reasons… I suppose those are “users” too…

why, humanity, why??? ;____;

How does this compare to salaries for comparable positions at comparable for-profit companies?

It’s kinda the point of donations that they can afford to hire people whose labor costs that much.

I’m not sure if that law will pass/has passed,

It has already passed the legislature and been signed into law, but not become operative yet, won’t until 2027-01-01.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043

I am not. I am from a country whose constitution starts with the statement that it is a democratic republic.

I would find it very sad if they were a majority, anywhere. :(

I really didn’t hear anything about it until recently

Yes, I expressed the same sentiment here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/55959326/24302621

Is our entire information “ecosystem” so broken that we only pay attention to bad things after they’ve already happened, not before when there is still a chance to stop them?!

OK, that’s about the elaboration I was looking for…

Somehow I don’t think this is the central reason. I think governments are perfectly capable of doing bad things completely without billionaires having an interest in it. It especially doesn’t explain things like the California law that will regulate how we can or cannot program operating systems (hint: software code is a form of speech, meaning that this ought to be struck down as a violation of free speech), because no age verification services are involved in that.

Billionaires certainly are people, but these laws don’t even serve billionaires in any meaningful sense, so that’s hardly an explanation without more elaboration.

In my youth I was taught that democracy meant that the government served the people.

What do any of these laws have to do with serving the people? Do they have anything to do with the will of the people?

Alright, I agree with you that modern “social media recommendation algorithms” are a bad thing that shouldn’t have been invented, if that is what you’re getting at.

I definitely agree with all of that.

But if you “learned the shortcuts to hide” what you were doing, then you were clearly accessing things you actively wanted to see, which was my entire point.

OK, if someone actively links me to it, then yes, but there’s also no solution to that because they could just send it (or a screenshot of it) directly to me and circumvent any filters there might be.

I’ve never clicked on a “hot singles in your area” ad, so no idea what that is about.

The entire Internet is of course IMHO about exploring and pursuing novel experiences; but how quickly do you imagine children can get from websites actively recommended by parents to shocking websites? Not very, I think?

That’s not very similar to how AI typically writes, at all.

even I have been somewhat traumatized by accessing graphic content I shouldn’t have

Why did you access it if it made you feel bad? It is (and has been since I remember) very difficult to accidentally run across anything shocking on the Internet.

because civil liberties don’t fit neatly into a left-right spectrum, despite being a lot more important than the economic policies that the left-right spectrum aims to describe, which is why I think the left-right spectrum is mostly useless

Yes, and it also says LIBE, which is the committee, not plenary, where this was recently voted on. It’s clearly not enough members for a plenary vote, this post is misinformation as titled.

at least https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22780466/why-cant-my-program-compile-under-windows-7-in-french was actually funny

I miss the days when making money from posting things on the Internet wasn’t really a (widespread) thing. In the earliest days of YouTube there was no partner program, everyone who uploaded anything there did so out of enthusiasm; if we still had that, maybe we’d have fewer videos overall, but no one would have a reason to post AI slop or other low-quality videos just for profit.