(TNS) – Artificial intelligence for political candidates spreads to fakes created during elections, which could lead to civil penalties of up to $250,000 a day under bills that are being considered by new legislative committees.
The bill is likely to be taken up soon by the House Communications & Technology Committee, D-Montgomery Chairman Joe Ciresi said Monday. The committee held its first meeting last week, moving forward with another AI-related measure that encouraged Congress to make it clear that machine-generated creative works are not copyrighted.
Ciresi said he expects the candidate acquisition bill to gain bipartisan support and will soon pass the committee.
The most famous candidate incident happened last year when New Hampshire residents got a robocall that sounded like the voice of then-President Biden, discouraging them from going to polls in the state primary.
Stephen Kramer, a Louisiana man, was later charged with charges that included suppression of felony voters after investigation into thousands of phone calls featuring recorded voices that appear to have been artificially generated to mimic Biden. They tried to convince voters to skip the vote in the state primary.
On Monday, Republican Rep. Jeremy Schaffer from Allegheny County said a bill to acquire candidates was needed.
“People already have a low level of trust in the political system. AI could eliminate all trust in it,” Shaffer said. Of particular importance, he said, he is working to discourage someone from using AI to “create the possibility of generating false videos of political candidates saying things they don’t say.”
The bill, sponsored by Philadelphia Democrat Tarik Khan, targets campaign ads that contain spoofs generated by AI “with the intent to misrepresent the candidate’s words, actions or beliefs.” The bill allows candidates who are eligible for advertising to file civil lawsuits and would allow daily civil penalties of up to $15,000 for violations related to civil elections. Up to $50,000 for those tied to state-level offices. Up to $250,000 for people related to elections at the federal level office.
A similar bill from Mr. Khan was approved by a House committee in the previous session but later stalled.
A copyright resolution sponsored by D-Chester’s Rep. Kristine Howard urges Congress to amend copyright laws and protects creative work-producing people from falling into AI-powered machines.
Howard said new questions emerge every day about the use of AI and what the rights and liability associated with it are. She said the lawsuit would take years to sort out such issues, and lawmakers can help by clarifying the meaning of the relevant law.
Copyright laws are federal. Howard’s resolution urges Congress to designate that “it is something that is copyrightable by natural people, or humans,” “feeding of copyrighted works, or eating AI programs known as “scraping”” is “harmful to the market value of copyrighted works.”
The resolution passed unanimously and now we go to the full house for consideration.
Ciresi said his committee is expected to become a legislative portal for many of the AI bills in the session. He wants to hold a hearing for them before he votes.
“It’s very detailed,” Ciresi said of the issues surrounding AI. He added that the effect is seen in “every part of life.”
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