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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

> This has been true in cases involving things like automatically generated search snippets or things like autocomplete. And that’s kind of important or we’d lose algorithmically generated summaries of search results.

I'm fine with that, actually. I don't agree that such things should be covered by 230 in the first place.

> Note that the exemption from 230 here is not just on the output of generative AI. It’s if the conduct “involves the use or provision” of generative AI. So, if you write a post, and an AI grammar/spellchecker suggests edits, then the company is no longer protected by Section 230?

This is a much bigger problem. In my opinion, this is what makes the proposed legislation utterly unacceptable.

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> I don't agree that such things should be covered by 230 in the first place.

Indeed. In my opinion, even "algorithmic feeds" should lose section 230 protection because the service now acts in an editorial capacity and directly controls what the user does and does not see.

It's unfair for a service that manipulates what users see for all kind of financial and ideological reasons to be treated as a mere "carrier" of information.

Edit: Reading the article more, it strikes me as contradictory to claim that AI generated output is both "novel" (for the purposes of copyright) but also protected by section 230. How can it be both? If AI output is protected by section 230 because it's merely transmitting third party speech, then surely the AI model is also bound by any copyright licenses on its training input.

on the flip side, adopting these provisions would all but ensure that only models you can run on your own machine will thrive

This seems like a good outcome to me. It would create a new wave of decentralization in computing instead running more and more things "in the cloud".

The problem with that that I see is that not everyone wants to or can be their own service provider and many would end up with nowhere to post without things in the cloud.

Section 230 was explicitly about allowing service providers to act in an editorial capacity, allowing them to remove content that they deemed offensive. The alternative was what happened in two court cases: moderate things and be liable for anything that slips through or moderate nothing and don't be liable for anything but the service fills with spam and other unwanted content and becomes unusable/not family friendly.

It was never about a platform being treated as a mere carrier, it was the exact opposite: allowing them to moderate without huge liability fears.

> Section 230 was explicitly about allowing service providers to act in an editorial capacity

Absolutely. Sites with user-generated content would be practically unusable without such protections.

However, the first two sub-sections list why the protections are being granted in the first place. When a social media platform's moderation actions are sufficiently opposed to those purposes, then I would argue they are no longer "good faith" moderation decisions per section 230 and thus fall outside of its protection.

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