JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – As the election year ramps up, Florida is taking steps to regulate video, images, and audio created with artificial intelligence.
Gov. Ron Desantis recently signed new legislation requiring political ads made with AI to disclose that information to the public. One internet consultant said the law may have unintended consequences and a watchdog group called it “weak.”
In a political video released last year by the Republican National Committee, AI-created images paint a grim picture of America: China invading Taiwan, financial markets in free fall, and entire cities being shut down due to crime,
Every image in the video was created with artificial intelligence.
House Bill 919 requires political ads to have a disclosure within the ad (which must be in12 point font for a print ad).
And for video ads the disclosure must be clearly readable, taking up 4% of the space of the TV screen and the audio disclosure must be 3 seconds long.
The bill defines “generative artificial intelligence as a “machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, emulate the structure and characteristics of input data in order to generate derived synthetic content including images, videos, audio, text, and other digital content.”
Breaking the law results in a criminal penalty a first-degree misdemeanor punishable by a prison sentence of up to one year.
Internet Security Consultant Chris Hamer who has carefully watched artificial intelligence grow in popularity said the new legislation may be susceptible to abuse.
“Because who’s going to police it? Who’s going to monitor all of the transmissions to say this is AI, this isn’t? And then if everybody responds by just saying if there’s a chance that we used AI in any of our advertisements, we’re going to put the disclaimer on everything, which means the disclaimer will now be meaningless because it will be everywhere,” Hamer said.
Hamer said a lot of the newer technology in video editing software already uses generative AI transparently in the background, helping video editors manipulate a component of the image. Hamer said it’s getting harder to recognize artificial intelligence-altered video because the technology is only getting better.
He’s concerned that the new legislation may have unintended consequences.
“It opens itself up to being used by other parties for purposes outside of the scope of the law. I think it can be used as kind of the truncheon for candidates that may or may or may not use AI. If they don’t use AI, and somebody takes offense that they’re advertising, they can invoke this law to level a claim against them that they did use AI but didn’t label it,” he said.
The Florida Elections Commission can also receive complaints of violation of the law and issue a fine. The new law goes into effect July 1.