State lawmakers want to crack down on artificial intelligence in elections, as Democrats consider it a potentially devious election meddling tool.
At least 26 states have passed or are considering laws to restrict campaigns from using AI to communicate in their messaging, and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., warns it is being "used to confuse — and even suppress — voters," Axios reported.
"I don't think gen-AI developers or platforms are taking the misuse potential serious enough," Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, added to Axios in an email.
The most high-profile AI election case came in January at the New Hampshire primary, where a President Joe Biden AI voice urged Democrats not to vote in the state's primary. Biden was rejected in that state because he bumped it from the first-in-the-nation for his favored South Carolina, so that primary featured his leading political opposition to get early primary delegates against him.
Ultimately, Biden won the nationwide primary after myriad roadblocks put up on his opposition, including Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., and now-Trump endorser Robert F. Kennedy.
But winning the primary could not get Biden over the hump of a bad June debate. Just a week later, Democrats urged Biden out of the race to hand the nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris, a fact Trump said disenfranchised voters and was ostensibly a political "coup" overruling the choice of the electorate by proxy.
Still, Democrats are concerned about AI being the threat to democracy and want laws to censor its use in election communications.
A breakdown of the nation-wide censorship effort, as reported by Axios:
- 19 states have passed laws restricting AI deepfakes, including most of the western states.
- Among the 2024 battlegrounds: Arizona, Michigan, are Wisconsin have passed laws to censor AI in elections; North Carolina and Pennsylvania are considering legislation; and only Georgia and Nevada have done neither yet.
- The effort is not just Democrats-controlled states, though. Texas, when it was hoped to be pulled into the Democrat column against Trump in 2019, was the first state to ban deepfakes in elections. Florida enacted an AI election restriction this year.
- Outside of those two largest red states, Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Mississippi, and Utah have passed restrictions, and Ohio is considering legislation. The rest are largely Democrat-strangleholds in elections.
- Alaska, Oklahoma, and Louisiana considered legislation this year that was struck down.
The push against social media influence in elections became a hot-button issue in 2016, as Hillary Clinton blamed "fake news" and Russian disinformation campaigns as an election meddling effort that helped President Donald Trump win. Trump has long called that narrative a deeply fake "hoax" and an election interference "scam."
While conservatives generally want less federal government control and fewer restrictions on the First Amendment, the push to censor AI in elections must become a federal government operation, according to Issue One's Council for Responsible Social Media Director Alix Fraser.
"At the end of the day, it's only going to be piecemeal," Fraser said of state censorship. "It's never going to be sufficient until we have federal action that covers the entire country."