The Mattress Tag Law For AI

The mattress tag law:

It’s only against the law to remove the tag prior to the sale and delivery of a pillow or mattress to the final consumer. Essentially, that means sellers can’t remove a “stamp, tag, label, or other identification” on a pillow or mattress; only consumers can.

With all the talk about AI in the news and the fears about what the future may bring, I think we kind of skipped over the problems AI has created already. We’re all focusing on the laws that may need to be passed to “make sure nothing will go wrong”.

I’ll posit that things have ALREADY gone wrong. Not a day goes by where someone on social media does not post unflattering AI generated content. We’ve all seen it.. Pictures of famous people in “less than positive” light. Videos with the audio replaced with extremely well synthesized voices, saying all sorts of absurd things.

These tools are mostly being abused for fun, but we have already seen some bad actors use them for nefarious purposes. I predict this will just get worse and worse with time. ( Especially in our current highly charged political environment )

So I’d like to propose a pretty simple solution that maximizes freedom, but reduces harm when it comes to AI in this context:

The AI mattress tag law: EVERY AI generated work, should it be code, images, video, etc. should be tagged/labeled as an AI generated work. Anyone REMOVING the tag and THEN posting the content into a public space would be liable for some form of a “significant enough” fine. ( And perhaps even personally liable under existing defamation laws )

Under these rules you can still generate all the silliness you want, and do what you wish with it as long as the tag remains. But using it to try to fool people… becomes a huge liability.