The Pathfinder: Deepfakes
Deepfakes, an offshoot of Artificial Intelligence (AI), have become a pressing social and political issue that many state lawmakers are trying to address through legislation. The number of bills in this space has grown from an average of 28 per year from 2019-2023 to 294 bills introduced to date in 2024 – a 950% increase.
According to the Government Accountability Office, deepfakes are “videos, audio, or images that seem real but have been manipulated with AI. They’ve been used to try to influence elections and to create non-consensual pornography.” On the political side, the American Association of Political Consultants issued a statement last year warning members that deepfakes posed “a dramatically different and dangerous threat to democracy” and that the group’s code of ethics “prohibits the use of ‘deepfake’ generative AI content.”
The warning was ignored. Campaigns and political parties continue using AI-generated images in their public-facing communications.
- Elon Musk reposted an AI-altered video of Vice President Kamala Harris from his personal X account without a disclaimer that it was computer-generated. In the clip, a Harris sound-alike says she was “the ultimate diversity hire” and that her critics are “both racist and sexist.” X’s terms of service prohibit the sharing of “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media…” In response to a post from California Gov. Gavin Newsom that said AI-manipulated ads would soon be illegal in his state, Musk wrote that “parody is legal in America.”
- Harris was the object of a more salacious deepfake that accused her of being a sex worker in the 1980s.
- Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has been the object of a number of sexually explicit online rumors, memes, and fakes since he joined the GOP ticket. None of these postings are true, but that hasn’t stopped any of them from gaining wide circulation – including becoming fodder for late-night television shows.
While the use of artificial intelligence to create fabricated videos and images to spread political misinformation is much talked about, another darker side of deepfakes involves pornography.
Female celebrities have long been targeted by having their image superimposed using artificial intelligence onto sexually explicit material. Female politicians are now also falling prey to non-consensual pornography. Sexualized deepfakes of celebrities like Taylor Swift, officeholders like Harris, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and hundreds of others have had their likenesses used to create pornographic images and videos.
This deepfake pornography, which primarily targets women, is becoming disturbingly common. A 2023 study indicated that 98 percent of deepfake videos circulated online are pornographic, and 99 percent of them target women or girls.
Ocasio-Cortez called the fake images “sexual violence,” which makes the reports of children using deepfakes to target other children profoundly disturbing. As the Wall Street Journal’s Julie Jargon wrote:
For the people depicted in those images, often young women, the pictures set in motion feelings of shame, fear, and a loss of control.
The technology to produce these images is easy to obtain, and either is cheap or free to use. The low barrier to entry has allowed deepfake pornography to flourish. In a November 2023 Journal story, Jargon reported:
More than 90% of such false imagery—known as “deepfakes”—is porn, according to image-detection firm Sensity AI. Tech firms, including Snap and TikTok, have pledged to work with government groups to stop such images from being circulated. Snap and others say they ban AI-generated sexual images of minors and report them to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The bottom line is that lawmakers have plenty of reasons to write legislation controlling deep fakes. Resources, such as the American Legislative Exchange Council and the American Bar Association, have produced model legislation lawmakers can use as they craft their own bills.
Model legislation helps legislators ensure that their bills avoid mistakes and fit within a state’s existing legal framework. Just as the tools for creating deepfakes have become free and easily accessible, we must also make the tools to help citizens and activists track them easy to access and free.
That’s why Ballotpedia has launched a new deepfake legislation tracker. This tracker will make it easier for people to follow these bills and for interest groups and political parties to get involved in the process.
The goal of this tracker is simple: to let people know what’s happening—in real-time—with deep fake legislation in all 50 states. That includes the use of deepfakes across a host of policy areas, including fraud, political communications, child sexual abuse, and intellectual and personal property rights. Our tracker also provides historical context, including links to deep fake legislation going back to 2019.
We hope this tracker will not only provide the general public with a powerful tool to help track bills as they move through the legislative process but also provide a central, authoritative, neutral resource for those who can use their legislative, political, and social expertise to make effective laws regulating deep fakes.
Ballotpedia’s legislation trackers help democratize information. Whether they are following bills on deepfakes, election administration, or the administrative state, our trackers provide the general public with billionaire-level information on a beer budget; actually, they are completely free and easily accessible.
The rich, connected, and powerful can tap advocacy organizations, legal experts, political professionals, and others to monitor any bill in any legislature (or all 50 of them) and find out where it stands in real time.
Our trackers provide that same level of access. In the case of our new deepfake legislation tracker, there has never been a greater need for a robust, trusted, and objective source of real-time information on how states are addressing this issue.
The Pathfinder is a monthly column written by Leslie Graves, founder of Ballotpedia, for Preserving Democracy. Exploring topics vital to our understanding of American civics and Democracy, The Pathfinder attempts to cut through the noise of political journalism while exploring issues of vital importance to the American voter.
