Hacker News Reader

Comment by arpa | Hacker News Reader

I, personally, find the concept of "illegal fiction" super, super disturbing, mostly because "illegal" is very arbitrary, and declaring _fiction_ illegal is literally creating thought-crime.

View on HN

Maybe the crime of fiction about children can be solved with a disclaimer in the footer “one year in the story generated by the AI is 10,000 Earth years” where a 3-year-old is actually a 30,000-year-old in our calendar. That’s how silly these attempts are at arbitrary obscenity thought crime laws about fiction.

Writing or reading or generating distasteful fiction shouldn’t be a crime just like a comedian should be able to joke about child abuse, like Louie CK’s joke about how maybe it’s the child’s fault for being too attractive or whatever it was. “But what if pedos agree with him?” feels like the argument people are making in these comments for illegalizing fiction.

We already have this. You cannot use fiction to deliberately harm somebody’s reputation, for example.

You absolutely can. You can write as much fiction as you want about whatever as long as you present it as such. You specifically cannot make statements presented as truth that you know to be false with the intent of causing harm to that person. It may seem pedantic but the difference is vital.

That's not true. This is the reason why movies will have a statement that similarity to real people is only coincidental.

There's a difference between explicitly closing off any potential for liability and what's being described. I could, in fact, write a story that I describe or strongly imply as fictional (this is the essential part) about anyone wherein I describe them as doing heinous or illegal acts. This is why satire is legal, this is why e.g. John Oliver can describe clearly untrue things about Trump or whomever for the sake of a joke, why comedy podcasts can make jokes about individuals that no reasonable person would presume to be true. The reason that movies have that disclaimer is: so they can avoid even the chance of people saying the movie's describing their real (non-fictional) life (which might require payment on the part of creators of the movie) or (by virtue of describing their real life) open the movie up to libel claims if a reasonable person may presume the work is accurately describing that person. They're crossing their T's because lawyers are expensive whereas comedians to some extent thrive on drama like that (because they almost certainly won't be held to libelous).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com