California Governor Signs Laws Protecting Kids From Risks of Social Media, AI Chatbots (apnews.com) 51
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a sweeping package of laws Thursday aimed at protecting children from the risks of technology, including social media and AI chatbots. The laws will penalize large social media companies up to $1 million per child if they are found negligent of harming children through their platforms, ban tech businesses from offering addictive feeds to anyone under 16, require operators of AI chatbots to perform risk assessments before rolling them out and allow families to opt out of receiving school-issued laptops.
Newsom joined his wife and state lawmakers at a children's museum near San Francisco to stress the importance of protecting kids at a time when they have such easy access to social media and AI chatbots. "We have designed cribs to be safe, chairs to be safe, car seats," Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan said. "Yet we've allowed technology to be handed to our children and never asked or expected it to be safe." [...]
Newsom also signed laws Wednesday, which are supported by Anthropic, that are aimed at improving oversight of AI companies. One of the measures requires the state to create rules for independent organizations to evaluate the safety risks of AI models, and the other requires the state to create a registry of AI auditors, who'd have to be financially independent from the businesses they are auditing.
Newsom joined his wife and state lawmakers at a children's museum near San Francisco to stress the importance of protecting kids at a time when they have such easy access to social media and AI chatbots. "We have designed cribs to be safe, chairs to be safe, car seats," Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan said. "Yet we've allowed technology to be handed to our children and never asked or expected it to be safe." [...]
Newsom also signed laws Wednesday, which are supported by Anthropic, that are aimed at improving oversight of AI companies. One of the measures requires the state to create rules for independent organizations to evaluate the safety risks of AI models, and the other requires the state to create a registry of AI auditors, who'd have to be financially independent from the businesses they are auditing.
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There's your daily dose of republicans thinking about transgender folks for today.
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Tell us.
Tell us whether you've seen more WNBA games or child porn videos.
Your vacuous or worse AC Subject here (Score:2)
But did you have to propagate it?
Evidently spans a lot of the discussion, but my real concern is the lack of potential for Funny for the story. Maybe if would help if they could get a fresh editor to pick more interesting news?
Which somehow led me to a worse idea? What if Slashdot started using an AI editor? Maybe they could name it ETS, standing for "Et Tu, Slashdot"? Or GEitS for "Ghost Editor in the Slashdot"? Now I feel like loading up an AI and asking it about possible names for such an AI editor... Th
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By an anonymous coward on a website that someone told him was where nerds hang out, and they're liberals.
Oh, I'm so punished. Geez, you should get out of your basement someday.
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"I don't like everyone losing X"
"So now you like nazis having X?"
we're usually fine with the concept ends, not the real-world means
though it turns out both are just casualties of political posturing that never cared about either (which explains why such a shitty version of the latter often results)
surely you see the dominoes between Think Of The Children shenanigans and mandating that OSs start tracking additional data
Cognitive Debt (Score:1)
Studies [mit.edu] show that adults face reduced brain connectivity with LLM usage.
Re:Protect Internet from Government Stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
Studies show the Internet, access to it, and social media in particular, have no negative impact on teens
Citation needed. Because there is strong evidence that social media in particular increases depression, anxiety, behavioral problems, sleep problems, body image issues, addiction, psychological problems, headaches, and other problems in children. And we've known it for years. Here's a summary of the research from 2022: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601... [mdpi.com]
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The article did mention that it is possible both are true - that teens who are more depressed are more likely to use social media intensively,
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I haven't read the nearly 70 studies this review article considered, but I would assume it is nearly impossible to design an ethical randomized control study to examine this question.
Which makes the answer useless. Because if doomscrolling causes mental issues, you want to discourage it, but if mental issues cause doomscrolling, you want to encourage it as a diagnostic tool.
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Which makes the answer useless.
This is how nearly all research on hazardous activities is done. You can't, for example, assign people to text while driving (and then see how many more of them die). Or give a test group fentanyl or a control group placebo and see which group has more deaths.
But the lack of a randomized control trial doesn't make it useless, and in many situations RCTs are ethically reprehensible.
Usually a finding of this sort suggests the strategy of taking away that hazard and then continuing to track the harms; and
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>>> depression, anxiety, behavioral problems, sleep problems, body image issues, addiction, psychological problems, headaches, and other problems in children
These issues should only provided by government controlled facilities like schools or summer camps!
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What studies? And how to they compare to the reports that were in all the papers a week or so ago, of major drops in reading ability?
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Is "the left" in the room with you right now?
Can I be included? (Score:2)
That is, can I demand they stop the addictive algorithms used to attract my attention?
And does that AI chatbots include AI agents? Because I would like to forbid them from hacking my accounts?
Donâ(TM)t Call and Drive v2 (Score:2)
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Now when you use your phone while driving, you have the added distraction of watching for police.
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To this day everyone uses cell phones in the car, including with their hands. The laws were impotent
This is completely false. The laws work fine when applied. The cops are too busy out writing speeding tickets to produce revenue to go after any other threats to public safety. Speeding tickets are a predictable revenue stream, they know about how many of them will just be paid, so they know how many they have to write to make the funding they need.
Please tell me again (Score:1)
why social media is supposed to be more harmful than 24 hour news channels, 5 hour World of Warcraft dungeons or google with safe search off.
How can you tell if the account is a childs? (Score:5, Insightful)
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However, given the levels of education and intelligence in the USA and some other countries, they would all fail to get an account.
So, no down side I can see
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Given how much data Alphabet, Meta, etc., have on people, they can figure our your age just from the data they already have on you.
I mean, when McDonald's has 512 pages of information on you that include your or
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Depending on the makeup of congress (Score:3)
after the election, the tech companies will whine to he federal government to preempt the California law under the pretext of an "inconsistent patchwork of state laws are not efficient nor profitable for business". This is the classic "Preempt and gut" strategy that lobbyists use to eliminate state legislation harmful to their keepers.
There is a long and short window here.
If the R's lose control of congress, expect a full court press during the lame duck session between election day and the end of the year. The legislation will be haphazardly concocted and the R's might try to use reconciliation to pass it by adding budget elements to it. In any case there's a high risk that the court system might find sloppy work and toss the portions of bill out if it passes congress and is signed by the President.
If the R's keep control of congress after the election, then a more airtight bill will be written, and attached to a reconciliation bill if the R's can't get cloture on a filibuster by the D's. This bill would be in a better position to survive court challenges.
protect = punish (Score:2, Troll)
Any time they tell you they are protecting someone, especially children, it is a smoke screen for either punishing some group or extracting money from them.
Correction (Score:4, Insightful)
"Yet we've allowed technology to be handed to our children and never asked or expected it to be safe."
The PARENTS give this technology to their children to act as a digital babysitting service.
If little Timmy is addicted / engaged to his tablet, he's not bothering Mom or Dad ( who are also addicted
/ engaged with their smartphones ).
This is not a problem for Law to fix.
This is a problem for parents who don't want to parent.
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Oddly enough, Democrats are traditionally the party that asks for the government to have larger roles for social and economic issues, so wouldn't they be the ones who want this more than the Republicans?
I'm only asking because California is a VERY blue state, so this seems like something the residents there would be happy to have.
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Now apply this same logic of parental blame vs sensible legislation to other risks to children, including guns, drugs, etc.
Also, this law just ensures the next series of debates and laws around what exactly is clear and identifiable definitions of "addictive feeds".
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Why you consider that other legislation sensible?
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