States are cracking down on deepfakes ahead of the 2024 election
The recording sounded an awful lot like President Joe Biden. In a robocall made to thousands of New Hampshire residents ahead of the state's presidential primary in January, an artificial-intelligence-generated dupe of the president's voice urged voters not to bother with the primary. NBC News later reported the audio was a complete fabrication created by a New Orleans street magician who said he was hired by Steve Kramer, a Democratic operative who has worked on Rep. Dean Phillips's presidential campaign.
There are still a lot of lingering questions about this scandal, but the biggest may be: How worried should we be about AI-generated fakery this election? In an attempt to get out in front of the problem, state legislators have been introducing and passing bans on deepfakes — media created using AI to impersonate politicians — around elections. Since January of last year, 41 states have introduced election-related deepfake bans, according to tracking by Public Citizen. Eight states have enacted laws regulating deepfakes, joining California and Texas, which in 2019 banned the use of deepfakes in elections. But these laws miss some of the AI threats experts say are most pressing and demonstrate how difficult it is to legislate this emerging technology while preserving First Amendment rights.
Deepfakes first emerged more than six years ago and — like so much of the internet — were originally used to generate porn. But the arrival over the last year of commercially available and easy-to-use AI platforms such as ChatGPT and DALL-E has made this technology much more accessible, creating new opportunities — and new threats. This is likely what spurred the sudden cascade of deepfake bans at the state level, said Daniel Weiner, the director of elections and government at the Brennan Center for Justice.
"Reasonably convincing deepfakes are easier for ordinary people who don't have a lot of resources or a lot of technical skill to create," Weiner said, adding that AI is a "threat amplifier" that has exacerbated existing risks to democracy, such as disinformation (risks that have also increased since 2020 for reasons unrelated to AI).
https://abcnews.go.com/538/states-cracking-deepfakes-ahead-2024-election/story
