Lawmakers are purposefully vague because judges can decipher what the spirit of the law is and fine corporations or condone specific use cases when they are brought up in court. You can't go into court to challenge a law with hypothetical cases for a good reason. Do you want lawmakers to arbitrarily impose constraints like only 10% of non article words can be suggested per message composition or only 2 posts per minute are allowed?
It is a fact in life that technology changes and improves things beyond what we could have foreseen in just a few years. The degree of flexibility built into these laws is a huge plus. Not a flaw.
It's a work related disease. A coder must consider all corner cases in advance. There is no judge to decipher the spirit of a program.
Me: "So, what should the program do when XYZ occurs?"
Marketing: "Uhm... Dunno, haven't thought about it. I'd decide by, you know, gut instinct. We haven't thought about that yet."
Me: implements a virtual coin-flip using Random.Next()
Once you've done that, it's easier.
Chances are, if the requirements person doesn't have an opinion on what the copy for the dialog should be if the customer is 65+ and it's a Tuesday in a month with 31 days, then it's because that choice doesn't really matter all that much.
Vagueness in law isn't a good thing. It leads to people randomly losing everything, even if they made a good faith attempt to follow the "spirit" of the law (whatever that actually is), for no better reason than lazy or incompetent law making. After all, lawmakers can easily update or change laws to reflect changing circumstances - they just prefer not to because regulating entirely new areas of life makes them feel better than the relatively boring work of updating existing laws.
Society changes faster than representatives can legislate.
I also think it’s an issue, as this law is set up to start a cat and mouse game, where precedents are slowly established, while bad faith actors find other workarounds and run with it until new rulings are set, to then rince and repeat.
When it comes to spam or ads, iterating workarounds is faster than bringing cases to court, so the traditional approach is problematic.
That leads to the judicial branch actually making the law and not having a consistent set of rules depending on who the judge is.
Do you want to build a business based on the whims of a judge when you thought that you were following the law?
Also see: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-07/the-fe...
...in which Matt Levine juxtaposes the concepts of going by rules versus what he calls "legal realism".
The problem is then nobody actually knows what the law is until after the judge decides it, at which point they're essentially creating new rules ex post facto and applying them to past conduct. It's manifestly unreasonable to apply a rule that wasn't known until five minutes ago to actions that took place last year.
> Trying to enumerate every legal interpretation and eventuality based on today's conditions and technology results in a law that won't be meaningful 5 years from now.
Which means you may have to pass a new law in five years -- that's not a bug. For that matter, if you expect things to change significantly then you may want to make the current rules expire in five years automatically, or hold off legislating anything at all until you see how things shake out on their own.
No, precedent is foundational to common law, not western law as a whole. There are two main forms of western law.
Because many people here are programmers, and finding edge cases and how to deal with them is often a significant portion of the job.
I assume it's also a large part of many lawyers jobs as well.
2,3,4) A judge could reasonably find that you were attempting to circumvent the law and declare all of these as “bot”.
The judicial system will not specify in writing complete coverage for every loophole. Judges can, regardless, find you guilty.
[0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/the-tcpa-protection-...
[2] https://abc7news.com/politics/campaigns-are-texting-voters-o...
It is when the substitution is both context-aware and not what you intended to write.
> 2,3,4) A judge could reasonably find that you were attempting to circumvent the law and declare all of these as “bot”.
Wait, so if someone sends you a question and the suggestions can detect from the context your answer, you're a bot because you chose the suggestion instead of typing out words with the same meaning? Then aren't most people texting going to have to declare themselves bots?
> The judicial system will not specify in writing complete coverage for every loophole. Judges can, regardless, find you guilty.
"Judges will decide something" is no help to you when you're trying to predict what they will decide ahead of time. Finding out after the fact does a fat lot of good after you've already engaged in the behavior in question and an unfavorable ruling puts you in jail.
The law clearly targets automated content creation that is not declared as such, not assistive writing technologies, and this will be considered by the judicial system when evaluating your stated intentions and actual actions. If you are unable to predict with confidence the outcome of your intentions and actions as they may be interpreted by the judicial system, please seek legal counsel for further guidance.
How are those two different things? In each case it's a machine generating and suggesting things that you may want to write. Presumably in the second case the suggestions would have to be more sophisticated in order to be coherent most of the time, but that still doesn't really give you any useful criteria to distinguish them. We're already at the point that phones have context-aware word suggestions. There isn't really a principled line to draw there at the point where the suggestions get good enough to constitute the entire message. It already happens sometimes.
Do you intend to prepare your thoughts as written word, and you use technology to write those thoughts rapidly? Then that’s probably fine.
Do you intend to prepare written works written by algorithm, software, or technology, to a degree that the work can no longer be reasonably considered the creative output of a tool-assisted human and is now instead the creative output of a human-assisted tool? Then that’s probably not fine.
If you want another way to look at this problem, imagine that our society grants algorithms copyright over the works they produce with our assistance, while granting us copyright of the works we produce with the assistance of algorithms, and that the law demands all algorithms be credited (CC-AT) when their copyrighted works are republished by humans. Copyright law has significant experience studying the problems of entangled and commingled ownership of works, but it’s too soon for US society to grant copyright to algorithms over their works, and so this law is all we get today.
> If you want another way to look at this problem, imagine that out society grants algorithms copyright over the works they produce with our assistance, while granting us copyright of the works we produce with the assistance of algorithms, and that the law demands all algorithms be credited (CC-AT) when their copyrighted works are republished by humans.
That's just restating the question, not answering it. And the hairy mess used for copyright is not a very promising thing to aspire to.
That will probably be distinguished between by a judge looking at all the facts that apply to a specific case, and making up a decision. Details such as these are the reason why there's a justice system with actual humans in it and not just some software bot calling shots by following if-then-else statements written in law documents.
They are of different colour[0]. Sounds like the law is aiming at that distinction.
Whether or not a piece of computer-generated content was "automated content" vs. "assistive writing" might entirely depend on the answer to the question "why was this piece of writing created?".
--
Ignoring predictable ambiguities to be resolved by the subjective whims of the judiciary is not the rule of law, and the fact that it regularly happens doesn't change that or make it right.
Believing so is a common misconception amongst engineers, but depending on it as such is likely to lead to disappointment, frustration, anger, needless bickering, extended conflict, and vexatiously long, hard to read, and mostly unenforceable contracts.
I mean, people have tried! Ethereum created a system of contracts implemented as a programming language. Know what it led to? People losing huge amounts of their money after someone found a bug in the contract and exploited it. And after that, the money was gone. The hacker had followed the contract as written, and the money was theirs now.
Ultimately, the only ways that situation doesn't play out is if the system is designed perfectly not just for current use but all future uses, or Humans are removed entirely from the equation. Since the former is impossible, and the latter means the system is either irrelevant or we're all dead and gone, we might as well accept Human intervention as inevitable.
Above all, if the law would be code, who would decide the input? Unless every conversation and record is already in the Law-Bots huge power is given to the "formatting" of the evidences.
Loopholes are just day 0 exploits of the legal system.
Making the law clear and correct is the only way to prevent the ambiguities from being construed in favor of whoever has the most money to spend litigating it.
Unless you were disabled and using assistive technology.
Probably for online, similarly one post would be allowed for each individual human approval, unless you ad the bot disclaimer.
If I made custom keyboards with just a few choices each, I think I could probably handle half a dozen without any problems.
And if I'm literally just always telling the bot "okay, go" with 1 button, I think I could handle dozens.
Who would those bots be? wccrawford1, wccrawford2, wccrawford3? That would not pretend to be anything other than bots or clone accounts.
If on the other hand your bots would be "Brock Samson", "Joey America" and "Chip Dipsby", etc. That would clearly be non-humans pretending to be humans, regardless of you tripping the first/last domino piece.
If I had live people answering, but their names were randomized, would that not be okay?
I honestly don't see any real difference between naming the bots like that. Yes, some people will be less likely to think they're bots if they're all named differently. But the vast majority of people will not notice if they get contacted by several different employees/bots all named Brock Samson. Most people won't even talk to more than 1 employee in a short timeframe to even have a chance to know there was a difference.