X Sues to Block California Law Cracking Down on Election Deepfakes

Elon Musk’s X is suing to block a new California law aimed at cracking down on deepfakes around election time, claiming it violates the First Amendment.

The Defending Democracy From Deepfake Deception Act of 2024, or AB 2655, looks to block “inauthentic, fake, or false” deepfake content 120 days before or after an election in California. Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill in September, saying 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 law also gives election officials and candidates the power to sue in response to misleading election deepfakes. 

As Bloomberg reports, X’s complaint alleges that the law will “result in the censorship of wide swaths of valuable political speech” and would also violate the First Amendment. It would replace “the judgments of covered platforms about what content belongs on their platforms with the judgments of the state.”

X argues the law will incentivize online platforms to “err on the side of removing and/or labeling any content that presents even a close call” when it comes to being “materially deceptive.”

In September, Musk said on X that Newsom had “signed a LAW to make parody illegal.”

OpenAI recently said it rejected over 250,000 requests to generate Dall-E images of candidates in the month before the US presidential election, as part of its wider campaign to stop election interference. Midjourney, another popular AI image generator, similarly banned images of presidential candidates ahead of the 2024 elections, highlighting moderation difficulties.

X’s latest chatbot for premium users, Grok-2, adopted a different approach. It allowed people to generate images of political figures, producing such bizarre images as Donald Trump holding Vice President Kamala Harris’s pregnant belly.