AI legislation: California to test law combating AI-based election fraud

California now has some of the toughest laws in the United States to crack down on pre-election fraud. Elections 2024 after the governor Gavin Newsom signed three landmark proposals this week at an artificial intelligence conference in San Francisco.

The state could be one of the first to test such legislation, which bans the use of AI to create fake images and videos in political ads leading up to Election Day.

State lawmakers in more than a dozen states have introduced similar proposals after the emergence of AI began to raise the threat of electoral disinformation Around the world, California’s new law is the most far-reaching. It targets not only materials that could affect how people vote, but also videos and images that could distort the integrity of elections. The law also covers materials that show election workers and voting machines, not just political candidates.

Of the three laws signed by Newsom on Tuesday, only one takes effect immediately to prevent deepfakes around the 2024 election. It makes it illegal to create and publish false election-related materials 120 days before Election Day and 60 days after. It also allows courts to stop distribution of the materials, and violators could face civil penalties. The law exempts parody and satire.

The goal, Newsom and lawmakers said, is to prevent the erosion of public confidence in U.S. elections amid a “tense political climate.”

The legislation is already drawing strong criticism from free speech advocates and social media platform operators.

Elon Musk, owner of the Social media platform Xcalled California’s new law unconstitutional and a violation of First AmendmentHours after they became law, Musk posted a post on X on Tuesday night sharing an AI-generated video featuring doctored audio of Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. His post of another deepfake featuring Harris prompted Newsom to promise to pass legislation to end the practice in July.

“The Governor of California just declared this parody video illegal, which violates the US Constitution. It would be a shame if this went viral,” Musk wrote of the AI-generated video, which has a caption identifying the video as a parody.

But it’s unclear how effective these laws are in stopping voter fraud, said Ilana Beller of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization. The group tracks state legislation related to voter fraud.

Neither law has been tested in court, Beller said.

The law’s effectiveness could be undermined by courts’ slowness in dealing with technology that can produce fake images for political ads and spread them at high speed.

It could take several days for a court to order an injunction to stop the distribution of the content, and by then, damage to a candidate or an election could have already occurred, Beller said.

“In an ideal world, we would be able to take down content the moment it’s posted,” he said. “Because the sooner the content can be taken down, the fewer people will see it, the fewer people will spread it through reposts and the like, and the quicker it can be dissipated.”

Still, having such a law in place could serve as a deterrent to potential violations, he said.

Newsom’s office did not immediately respond to questions about whether Musk’s post violated the new state law.

Assemblywoman Gail Pellerin, the bill’s author, was not immediately available for comment Wednesday.

Newsom also signed two other laws Tuesday, modeled after some of the nation’s first anti-voter fraud laws enacted in California in 2019, that require campaigns to begin disclosing AI-generated materials and force online platforms, such as X, to remove misleading material. Those laws will take effect next year, after the 2024 election.