They either don’t grok the situation at all, or grok it all too well but are pretending not to: either way, Democrats are once again on a warpath against memes, satire, etc., and in the same token against constitutionally protected political speech.
All this is happening months ahead of another presidential election.
Here the target is the Grok-2 AI art generator, which X released earlier this month. Now House Democrats have written to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) Acting General Counsel Lisa Stevenson in a bid to have it censored.
The seven members of Congress who signed the letter claim that restricting what can be done with Grok-2 is “critical for US democracy.”
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
In the two weeks since it was introduced, the art generator produced some blatantly obvious humorous takes on the ongoing campaign, many of them memes clearly not having a favorable view of Kamala Harris, while the same is true of others that “featured” Donald Trump.
But despite the obvious nature of this imagery, namely, as memes (in one of them Harris is depicted as addressing a venue in Chicago brimming with communist hammers and sickle flags) – the signatories chose to apparently take it all very seriously, and speak about “deep fakes” and “misleading” AI content.
And they want the FEC to come up with new rules to address this.
But its chairman, Sean Cooksey, quickly clarified the position of the election regulator regarding this topic, referring to the letter as a demand to censor the generator ahead of the election.
In a post on X, he writes, “Let me be clear: the First Amendment is not optional. I’ll never support shutting down political speech online, including your memes.”
The House Democrats’ letter stated it was sent in support of a petition by a non-profit, Public Citizen, which is pressing for new rules that would “clarify” Law Against Fraudulent Misrepresentation – specifically to include deep fakes in the definition.
The letter further accuses X of rolling out Grok-2 “with few rules to combat its misuse.”
Referring to memes as “fake images,” Democrats speak of the proliferation of deep fake AI technology and the way it could “severely misinform voters, causing confusion and disseminating dangerous falsehoods.”
The memes generated using Grok-2 are treated as dissemination of said “dangerous and confusing” fake content.
To deal with this drama, the way the letter presents it, Democrats want the FEC to initiate “the necessary emergency rulemaking process.”
