The Machines Have to Say So Now

I read something this morning that made me put my cup down.

New rules came in across Europe this month. From now a machine has to tell you when it is a machine. If you are speaking to something that is not a person it has to say so. And anything a machine writes or paints or dreams up has to carry a small mark, so you know it did not come from a human hand.

My first thought was not about technology at all. It was about honesty.

We have spent a few years now unable to tell what is real. A face that never lived. A voice that sounds like someone we love. A paragraph so smooth it could be anyone or no one. It unsettles you after a while. You start to squint at everything.

The rule is small. The question underneath it is very old. How do we know what to trust.

What stays with me is that we needed a law for this. That we had to be told to be told. Somewhere along the way knowing who was speaking to us stopped being a given and became a right we had to write down.

I do not think the real answer lives in the law though. I think it lives in the slow things. A handwritten letter. A long lunch. A voice on the phone that pauses to breathe. Machines can label themselves all they like. I am glad they must. But the surest sign I know that something is real is that it took time and that it cost the person something to give.

So I will take the labels. And I will keep the tea and the long conversations and the people who show up in the flesh. Those have never needed a disclaimer.