Deepfakes and elections: Georgia lawmakers seek to outlaw fake AI-generated messages

ATLANTA - Deep fakes are spreading rapidly everywhere online, on smartphones, and all devices. 

One of the latest, most public incidents was a robocall mimicking President Joe Biden’s voice urging voters not to cast their ballots in the New Hampshire primary. 

A Georgia lawmaker wants to pull the plug on deepfakes in political campaigns.

"The potential threats are enormous. This could literally sway elections," said state Sen. John Albers, R-District 56.

What is a deepfake?

"(A deepfake is an) image or video or audio clones of people that have been produced without their consent," said David Scwheidel, marketing professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School.

Albers introduced a bill that would make it a felony to produce deepfakes to interfere with an election. "You cannot, as an outside group, influence an election by using someone’s voice, their likeness, pictures, videos etc. to create a false narrative in the goal of influencing and changing the elections results," Albers said.

Albers says he wants to prevent bad actors from flooding voters with false information. "I don’t want to see something that’s false unduly impacting our elections," Albers said.

Georgia state Capitol (FOX 5)

"Generally, a good idea," said Sarah Hunt-Blackwell, First Amendment Policy Advocate with the ACLU of Georgia.

Could a ban on deepfakes violate the First Amendment?

Hunt-Blackwell says the bill’s current language is inexact and could violate First Amendment rights. "We would like to see the felony charge removed, we would like to see exceptions included for deepfakes that are parodies or satirical. We would like to see exceptions for media outlets," Hunt-Blackwell said.

Albers called that assessment "inaccurate." But he says he is fine-tuning his bill to reach a consensus.

Schweidel says rapidly improving artificial intelligence can make it difficult for an audience to know if what they’re seeing, reading or hearing is real or a synthetic copy.

"The advances in ai simply facilitating how easy it is to do this," Schweidel said. "We’ve seen it in the political arena with robocalls imitating Joe Biden’s voice. With an election coming up, misinformation on steroids."

Schweidel urges voters to always consider the source of information. "Digging in and figuring out is this legitimate content? If it is coming from an authoritative source. Have they done their fact checking?" Schweidel said.