The Simplest Problem With The OSA.

The Online Safety Act has many and many problems, from efficacy to freedom of speech to privacy. But I think that we have massively overlooked the simplest of problems with it.

And that is the hypocrisy.

When they scream to protect the children from harmful content, but refuse to regulate “AI”, which is preffered by 87% of people!

https://innovatingwithai.com/is-ai-search-replacing-traditional-search/

Or when “AI” chatbots will spit out licensed therapist numbers.

https://www.404media.co/instagram-ai-studio-therapy-chatbots-lie-about-being-licensed-therapists/

Or when chatbots will encourage people to have relationships with them.

https://studyfinds.org/falling-for-machines-the-growing-world-of-human-ai-romance/

Or when chatbots directly led to suicide.

https://www.404media.co/chatgpt-encouraged-suicidal-teen-not-to-seek-help-lawsuit-claims/

Where website operators are faced with falling visits by real users - and therefore ad revenue and impact fall - but with increased hardware demands from higher load .

https://www.analyticsinsight.net/news/google-ai-search-impact-website-traffic-slashes-by-50

Or the mass of misinformation that is generated from AI, from telling people to eat rocks - whilst being pursuasive enough that most people are tricked.

Where “AI” is causing real harm.

Why? Because that would be anti-growth, and as labour has shot themselves in the foot with deciding to be the “pro-growth”. Because they want to be centrist and appeal to the centre-right (whilst alienating the left with a left-wing policies). They decide that growth means GDP, and not unemployment (as it meant for hundreds of years until the ~90 years ago). Origin Story has an excellent podcast on this:

https://megaphone.link/NSR6989983635

But what they need to get into their head is that growth doesn’t mean the economy. It means becoming a better version of yourselves. And that does not mean that we need to sacrifice everything into facillitating companies to exploit us as much as possible. It means improving social mobility and access to human rights.

It means making the world a better place.

Labour should have been the ones to challenge the shift towards authoritarianism and fascism with free, liberal democracy.

But instead they have decided to be the authoritarians.

Labour needs to stop thinking about making the world a better place.

Note on the OSA: I am partially supportive of some rules towards age-verification. I agree that age verification should be required for content that it is already illegal for minors to access, but with a caveat: the age verification infrastructure should be provided by the government and in a secure and effective way. Possibly by using a passkey that is provided by the government and can be acquired for free - like how the EU is doing this. Whilst I understand that this isn’t perfect, I believe that this is a realistic compromise. However, these laws must be clear (like the 30% of content being NSFW in some US states) and leave no room for interpretation as these can cause over moderation. They must also not include restrictions on content that is legal for minors to access, but not advised (like graphic content) as this could restrict access to the news and other legitimate sources of information. They must also protect minorities (as much LGBTQ+ content has been caught up in anti-porn laws) and education purposes.