Generative AI: Text, Image, Video & Audio Synthesis

The strongest good-faith objection: this issue's whole framework (named-individual consent, paid-content disclosure) is precisely scoped to avoid regulating generative AI's capability, but "AI slop" is a volume problem, and volume problems are exactly the kind of thing that resists precise, narrowly-targeted rules. A critic could reasonably argue that Proposal 6's "real enforcement, not nominal policy" standard is either too vague to be a policy (what specifically counts as "real"?) or, if made specific enough to be enforceable, starts to look like exactly the kind of broad content restriction this issue otherwise declines to support. This issue's answer — identity verification for commercial publishing accounts, the kind Amazon has already implemented — is a concrete answer, but a fair critic could still ask whether it scales to video platforms and open web content the same way it does to a single bookseller's marketplace. That's an implementation question, not a reason to abandon the standard: the identity-verification principle scales in the same direction regardless of platform size, even if the specific mechanics differ. "Know who's publishing at commercial scale" is achievable everywhere large aggregation happens, and working out the platform-specific mechanics is the normal, unremarkable work of implementing any enforcement standard, not evidence the standard itself is wrong.

Everyday internet users bear the diffuse, hard-to-quantify cost of a degraded information and media environment — lower trust in what they read, watch, and buy, without any single incident being severe enough to prompt individual recourse. Legitimate authors, journalists, and video creators bear a competitive cost: their effortful work competes for attention and marketplace visibility against near-zero-cost synthetic volume. Children are a specific, documented population bearing a sharper version of this cost, per the video-recommendation finding above. Larger platforms bear the direct compliance cost Proposal 6 imposes — the deliberate target, since the size threshold exists specifically to put that cost where the harm is concentrated rather than on every small platform regardless of exposure.