Interesting initiative but I wonder if the mode provides sufficient granularity. For example, what about an original human-generated text that is entirely translated by an AI?
Years ago people were arguing that fashion magazines should have to disclose if they photoshopped pictures of women to make them look skinnier. France implemented this law, and I believe other countries have as well. I believe that we should have similar laws for AI generated content.
I'm all for some kind of disclosure, but where do we draw the line. I use a pretty smart grammar and spell checker, one that's got more "AI" in it to analyze the sentence structure. Is that AI content?
It feels like a header is the wrong tool for this, even if you hypothetically would want to disclose that, would you expect a blog cms to offer the feature? Or a web browser to surface it?
Completely the wrong way around. We are heading into a future where everything will be touched by AI in some way, be it things like Photoshop Generative Fill, spell check, subtitles, face filters, upscaling, translation or just good old algorithmic recommendations. Even many smartphones already run AI over every photo they make.
Doing it in a HTTP header is furthermore extremely lossly, files get copy around and that header ain't coming with them. It's not a practical place to put that info, especially when we have Exif inside the images themselves.
The proper way to handle this is mark authentic content and keeping a trail of how it was edited, since that's the rare thing you might to highlight in a sea of slop,
https://contentauthenticity.org/ is trying to do that.
Maybe an ignorant question but at the dictionary level, how would one indicate that multiple providers/models went into the resulting work (based on the example given)? Is there a standard for nested lists?
The bigger challenge here is that we already struggle with basic metadata integrity. Sites routinely manipulate creation dates for SEO - I regularly see 5-year-old content timestamped as "published yesterday" to game Google's freshness signals.
While this doesn't invalidate the proposal, it does suggest we'd see similar abuse patterns emerge, once this header becomes a ranking factor.
Maybe we should avoid training AI with AI-generated content: that's a use case I would defend.
Still I believe MIME would be the right place to say something about the Media, rather than the Transport protocol.
On a lighter note: we should consider second order consequences. The EU commission will demand its own EU-AI-Disclosure header be send to EU citizens, and will require consent from the user before showing him AI generated stuff. UK will require age validation before showing AI stuff to protect the children's brains. France will use the header to compute a new tax on AI generated content, due by all online platform who want to show AI generated content to french citizens.
That's a Pandora box I wouldn't even talk about, much less open...
I'm genuinely torn. On one hand, transparency is good. But on the other, I can totally see this header becoming a lazy filter for platforms to just automatically demote or even block any AI-assisted content. What happens to artists using AI tools, or writers using it for brainstorming?
This seems like a (potential) solution looking for a nail-shaped problem.
Yes, there is a huge problem with AI content flooding the field, and being able to identify/exclude it would be nice (for a variety of purposes)
However, the issue isn't that content was "AI generated"; as long as the content is correct, and is what the user was looking for, they don't really care.
The issue is content that was generated en-masse, is largely not correct/trustworthy, and serves only to to game SEO/clicks/screentime/etc.
A system where the content you are actually trying to avoid has to opt in is doomed for failure. Is the purpose/expectation here that search/cdn companies attempt to classify, and identify, "AI content"?
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[ 408 ms ] story [ 769 ms ] threadI'd love to browse without that.
It does not bother me that someone used a tool to help them write if the content is not meant to manipulate me.
Let's solve the actual problem.
Doing it in a HTTP header is furthermore extremely lossly, files get copy around and that header ain't coming with them. It's not a practical place to put that info, especially when we have Exif inside the images themselves.
The proper way to handle this is mark authentic content and keeping a trail of how it was edited, since that's the rare thing you might to highlight in a sea of slop, https://contentauthenticity.org/ is trying to do that.
Maybe better define an RDF vocabulary for that instead, so that individual DIVs and IMGs can be correctly annotated in HTML. ;)
While this doesn't invalidate the proposal, it does suggest we'd see similar abuse patterns emerge, once this header becomes a ranking factor.
Still I believe MIME would be the right place to say something about the Media, rather than the Transport protocol.
On a lighter note: we should consider second order consequences. The EU commission will demand its own EU-AI-Disclosure header be send to EU citizens, and will require consent from the user before showing him AI generated stuff. UK will require age validation before showing AI stuff to protect the children's brains. France will use the header to compute a new tax on AI generated content, due by all online platform who want to show AI generated content to french citizens.
That's a Pandora box I wouldn't even talk about, much less open...
Yes, there is a huge problem with AI content flooding the field, and being able to identify/exclude it would be nice (for a variety of purposes)
However, the issue isn't that content was "AI generated"; as long as the content is correct, and is what the user was looking for, they don't really care.
The issue is content that was generated en-masse, is largely not correct/trustworthy, and serves only to to game SEO/clicks/screentime/etc.
A system where the content you are actually trying to avoid has to opt in is doomed for failure. Is the purpose/expectation here that search/cdn companies attempt to classify, and identify, "AI content"?