With the primaries in the rearview mirror and the November general election just eight months away, lawmakers have introduced bills focusing on the technology’s potential to confuse and deceive voters and otherwise disrupt elections.
The legislation was announced at a news conference Wednesday hosted by policy group California Common Cause. The group’s California Initiative for Technology and Democracy launched last year to fight the potential for AI-generated content to distort political messaging and confuse voters.
Assemblymember Marc Berman, D-Palo Alto, introduced AB2655, which would require large social media sites to label election-related deepfakes. The goal would be to limit the “spread of election-related deceptive deepfakes meant to prevent voters from voting or to deceive them based on fraudulent content,” Berman said.
That effort follows a 2019 law Berman authored on deepfakes — videos that use technology to animate a person’s face or body and make it appear that they said or did things that they did not. That law, AB730, prohibits the distribution of deceptive audio or visual material of a political candidate within 60 days of an election.
Meanwhile, state Sen. Steve Padilla, D-Chula Vista, introduced SB1228, which he said would require large online social media sites to verify the identity of users with more than 25,000 followers or who have shared more than 1,000 pieces of AI-generated content.
Accounts with more than 100,000 followers or sharing more than 5,000 pieces of AI-generated content would require verification via a government-issued ID, Padilla said.
In response to a question about the legislation’s potential to run afoul of free-speech rights, Padilla said the bill “isn’t something that’s going to stifle free expression.” He added: “It is only going to inform the consumer so that they can make an informed decision.”
Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, D-Santa Cruz, also attended the discussion Wednesday in Sacramento. Her bill, AB2839, introduced last month, would ban AI-generated and other digitally manipulated campaign media within 120 days of an election, as well as 60 days afterward.
Pellerin also chairs the Assembly elections committee.
There are currently dozens of active bills in the Legislature seeking to regulate AI. Bills are frequently dropped by their authors, fail to make it through committee or are merged with other similar pieces of legislation. Here are some of the other major areas in which Sacramento is gearing up to regulate AI this session:
- Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, introduced perhaps the most overarching bill last month aimed at safety testing large AI programs before they are introduced to the public. That bill would create more state resources for testing AI programs and force companies to disclose their safety protocols to the state’s technology department. It would also permit the state to sue under certain circumstances if the technology runs awry, but exempts smaller startups.
- A bill from Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, would require the state government to assess the pros and cons of using AI in its own systems, and require departments to disclose whenever they use the technology in their communications.
- Bay Area lawmaker Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, is carrying a bill this session that originally intended to require companies to “watermark” their AI-generated content. That bill currently reads more broadly, aiming to create “a mechanism to allow consumers to easily determine whether images, audio, video, or text was created by generative artificial intelligence.”
- Assemblymember Evan Low, D-Cupertino, has also authored a bill that would require watermarking of deep fakes and other AI-generated content.
- Assemblymember Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, is authoring a bill that would ban police from using a match from facial recognition technology as the sole cause for an arrest or warrant. The technology often uses a form of AI to search for facial matches in a large database.
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