Many people dropped off their ballots at the country Registrar of Voters office. Photo by Chris Stone
Many people dropped off their ballots at the country Registrar of Voters office. Photo by Chris Stone

An AI-generated voice that sounds like President Biden and tried to discourage voter participation last month is proof that artificial intelligence is a threat to public trust and can discourage voter participation, Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, a Santa Cruz Democrat, told CalMatters. That’s why she proposed a bill to ban “materially deceptive” election-related deepfakes 120 days before election day and 60 days after.

“We have to stay ahead of the deepfakes and bad actors that are out there trying to wreak chaos with our elections,” Pellerin said.

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It’s one of five bills introduced in the California Legislature this week designed to protect democratic discourse, voters, candidates, and election officials from deceptive content.

The other four bills would: 

  • Require generative AI companies to embed digital provenance data within the digital media they create.
  • Require social media platforms to identify and label images, audio, and video generated by AI.
  • Require generative AI companies supply tools to verify whether a photo is real or fake.
  • Encourage identity verification of social media accounts meeting certain follower thresholds so users know whether a person or an automated bot is behind a social media account.

None of the bills has been assigned a bill number yet. 

Each of the bills is cosponsored by the California Initiative for Technology and Democracy, a multidisciplinary nonprofit group formed in 2023 to protect elections from harmful or malicious forms of AI.

An October 2023 UC Berkeley poll found that seven out of 10 registered voters in California want lawmakers to protect the public from technology in the upcoming election. The news follows a Federal Communications Commission ruling late last week that made robocalls with AI-generated voices illegal.

Dozens of pieces of legislation have been introduced in the California legislature this year to regulate AI. Procurement policy that determines what kind of contracts state agencies can sign with private companies and proofs of concepts ordered by a Newsom executive order are also underway. 

CalMatters is a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works and why it matters.