California’s state legislature has passed several bills related to “AI,” including a ban on deepfakes “around elections.”
The lawmakers squeezed these bills in during the last week of the current sessions of the state Senate and House, and it is now up to Governor Gavin Newsom (who has called for such laws) to sign or veto them by the end of this month.
One of the likely future laws is Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act of 2024, which aims to regulate how sites, apps, and social media (defined for the purposes of the legislation as large online platforms) should deal with content that the bill considers to be “materially deceptive related to elections in California.”
Namely, the bill wants such content blocked, specifying that this refers to “specified” periods – 120 days before and 60 days after an election. And campaigns will have to disclose if their ads contain AI-altered content.
Now comes the hard part – what qualifies for blocking as deceptive, in order to “defend democracy from deepfakes”? It’s a very broad “definition” that can be interpreted all the way to banning memes.
For example, who’s to say if – satirical – content that shows a candidate “saying something (they) did not do or say” can end up “reasonably likely” harming the reputation or prospects of a candidate? And who’s to judge what “reasonably likely” is? But the bill uses these terms, and there’s more.
Also outlawed would be content showing an election official “doing or saying something in connection with the performance of their elections-related duties that the elections official did not do or say and that is reasonably likely to falsely undermine confidence in the outcome of one or more election contests.”
If the bill gets signed into law on September 30, given the time-frame, it would comprehensively cover not only the current campaign, but the period after it.
And “translated” into plain language, the provisions are designed to “protect” candidates from AI-generated content in any scenario (when such measures are actually justified, or merely, for example, as part of the “war on memes”).
Another category to protect are election officials, that is, “election integrity” (one can make an educated guess, in case an election is contested – again, even if the content is protected lawful speech such as satire).
It’s the “reasonably likely” phrase that leaves space for such broad interpretations.
