California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law five pieces of legislation relating to AI and deepfakes yesterday, including two that will give performers - and the estates of deceased performers - more control over the use of likeness and voice in digital replicas.
The other three relate to political content generated during election campaigns, and include new obligations for social media platforms, prompting X owner and Newsom hater Elon Musk to declare that parody is now illegal in California. Hitting out at the state’s Democrat governor, Musk wrote, “They are ACTUALLY trying to make posting memes illegal - vote them out”.
Union SAG-AFTRA has been actively campaigning for the new protections for performers. “No technology should be introduced into society without extreme caution and careful consideration of its long-term impact on humanity and the natural world”, said the union’s President Fran Drescher yesterday. “We are so grateful to Governor Newsom for recognising that performers matter and their contributions have value”.
The new protections were passed by the state’s Senate last month. One provision addresses concerns that movie studios or record labels might claim that wide-ranging clauses in performer contracts relating to likeness rights allow them to generate digital replicas of that performer's image or voice.
Contract terms relied upon when using AI to imitate a performer’s likeness or voice will now need to include a “reasonably specific description of the intended uses of the digital replica”.
The other main change relates to the use of a deceased person’s voice or likeness in digital replicas and the requirement to get permission from the relevant estate. It updates existing laws in that domain, removing exemptions for film, TV and other audiovisual works when it comes to digital replicas.
SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland also welcomed the “much-needed” new laws that prioritise “the rights of individuals in the AI age. No one should live in fear of becoming someone else’s unpaid digital puppet. Governor Newsom has led the way in protecting people - and families - from AI replication without real consent”.
The new laws relating to political content require social media platforms to “remove or label deceptive and digitally altered or created content related to elections during specified periods”, and to have systems in place via which such content can be reported.
Any election campaign adverts generated or manipulated by AI will also have to be labelled as such, and existing laws prohibiting anyone for distributing “materially deceptive audio or visual media” about candidates in the run up to an election have been amended, expanding that prohibition from 60 to 120 days before an election takes place.
As the owner of X, Musk is a vocal critic of any laws that regulate social media platforms, always presenting his criticism as part of a wider crusade to protect freedom of speech, and - when the regulation is happening in the US - as another reason to vote for Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election.
Back in July, Newsom criticised Musk for sharing a video on X which manipulated Kamala Harris’s voice so that she appeared to make numerous ridiculous statements.
To be fair, the statements in that video were sufficiently ridiculous that it was pretty obviously a parody and the accompanying caption (although not the video itself) stated that that was the case. Nevertheless, Newsom wrote on X that “manipulating a voice in an ‘ad’ like this one should be illegal, I’ll be signing a bill in a matter of weeks to make sure it is”.
Musk referenced that criticism when lashing out at the new laws in California yesterday, reposting the Harris video and stating, “You're not gonna believe this, but Gavin Newsom just announced that he signed a LAW to make parody illegal, based on this video”.
Undeterred by the latest Musk moans, Newson said of the new laws, “Safeguarding the integrity of elections is essential to democracy and it’s critical that we ensure AI is not deployed to undermine the public’s trust through disinformation - especially in today’s fraught political climate”.
The new rules, he added, “will help to combat the harmful use of deepfakes in political ads and other content, one of several areas in which the state is being proactive to foster transparent and trustworthy AI”.
Of course, despite Musk’s claims, the new laws don’t actually make parody illegal in California. But maybe Musk saying that was in itself parody. It can be very hard to tell sometimes.