Working to balance free speech and deceptive AI messages

As a former journalist, I get really fired up about transparency and accountability in government, which is in part why I begged to be on my committee after I first got elected. I was a really intense dork hassling the future Secretary of State to put in a good word for me even though I had just met her six minutes ago.

In House Government Operations and Military Affairs, we have jurisdiction over many things, two of which are open meeting laws and election laws. We have two really interesting bills in our committee right now that came over to us from the Senate: S.23, which is about using synthetic media in elections, and S.59, which is a bill that makes amendments to current open meeting laws.

There’s a link between these two bills that I love to think about and talk about and even almost bored the butcher at the Shelburne Meat Market to death with last week when he was like, “How are you?” And I started talking about AI in elections and I think he was praying, “Oh God, please send me a meat emergency so I can run away. I didn’t even really care how this lady is doing.”

The connection is this: free speech and the First Amendment. Remember last year when a robocall went out in New Hampshire that was fake Joe Biden telling people not to vote in the presidential election? That’s synthetic media; it could also be an AI-generated video, the deepfake kind where it looks, sounds and generally appears to be totally real. In this case, it was intentionally created to disenfranchise voters and maliciously influence the outcome of an election.

As technology improves and evolves so rapidly right now, it’s hard for people to know what’s real and what isn’t, especially since people (erroneously, in my opinion) often blindly trust that what they see on social media is true. By the way, don’t worry, your grandmother won’t get put in the slammer for sharing something she thinks is true; we’re working on the law in a way that makes sure it targets the purposefully deceptive folks.

So this bill proposes to require some kind of disclosure on synthetic media in the 90-day period before an election. Like, when candidates run for office, they have to include on their campaign materials who paid for them. If a PAC makes a TV ad, they have to say that they paid for it.

The synthetic media disclosure is a parallel to this and would require anyone creating that content to include a statement that it was created using AI and that it’s not real.

Fun little thing I learned while we were working on this bill: Politicians are legally allowed to lie! Not that I’ll take advantage of this loophole, of course, but it’s nice to know.

The trick is to make sure that any laws we make prohibiting these kinds of synthetic media don’t trample on our right to free speech, political speech and things like parody and satire. Other states have similar laws, upon which we modeled this one in order to avoid unconstitutionality. 

One part of the open meeting law bill that intersects with the AI bill is a section that would prohibit members of the public from egregiously disrupting public meetings. It’s the same issue: People have a right to make their voices heard, and just because someone is unpleasant or slightly disruptive by doing so, we can’t stop them. I learned an interesting fact while we were hearing testimony on this bill — heckling is actually considered a part of the democratic process. As elected officials, in the eyes of the law, we’re signing ourselves up for a certain amount of disgruntled loudness on the part of the public, which I love. I mean, I do prefer a civil conversation or a quick text that says, “You’re the worst!” but if public heckling is part of the gig, then I’m all for it. And I certainly don’t want to limit that.

The part where this gets tricky and fascinating is that as people who live in the United States, we are also constitutionally given the right to freely assemble. We heard some pretty grim stories from town clerks and other public officials that detailed habitually aggressive persons who are so disruptive that they’re actually causing meetings and town halls to shutter, which means that this one angry person is violating the constitutional rights of everyone who’s trying to get through a darn meeting without getting shouted at during a public comment section of a meeting taking two hours. 

I think it’s incredibly important right now that all of our rights to free speech and access to government and its processes are held sacred; this is certainly not the time to even accidentally limit our First Amendment rights, even if the intent of these bills is to make sure we’re all allowed to participate in democracy safely. So, we’re carefully taking our time on them to make sure we’re standing on that tightrope between preserving democracy and limiting it.

Of course, you’re allowed to heckle me, as we now all know, but I prefer not. In any case, you can always reach me by email or 917-887-8231.