Political Reform Act of 1974: political advertisements: artificial intelligence.

Existing law, the Political Reform Act of 1974, requires certain advertisements to contain specified disclosures. The Fair Political Practices Commission is charged with administering and implementing the act, and may, when it determines a violation has occurred, bring an administrative action and issue an order requiring the violator to cease and desist the violation, file specified documents, or pay a monetary penalty of up to $5,000 per violation. The commission may also, in certain instances, bring a civil action against any person who violates any provision of the act. This bill would require a committee that creates, originally publishes, or originally distributes a qualified political advertisement to include in the advertisement a specified disclosure that the advertisement was generated or substantially altered using artificial intelligence, as defined. The bill would prescribe formatting requirements for this disclosure depending on the medium of the qualified political advertisement. The bill would define "qualified political advertisement" to include any advertisement, as specified, that contains any image, audio, or video that is generated or substantially altered using artificial intelligence. The bill would specify that any image, audio, video, or other media is generated or substantially altered using artificial intelligence if it is entirely created using artificial intelligence and would falsely appear to a reasonable person to be authentic or materially altered by artificial intelligence such that a reasonable person would have a fundamentally different understanding of the altered media when comparing it to an unaltered version. The bill would authorize the commission to enforce a violation of these disclosure requirements by seeking injunctive relief to compel compliance or pursuing any other administrative or civil remedies available to the commission under the act. The bill would specify that a violation of these disclosure requirements does not constitute a misdemeanor. The Political Reform Act of 1974, an initiative measure, provides that the Legislature may amend the act to further the act's purposes upon a 23 vote of each house of the Legislature and compliance with specified procedural requirements. This bill would declare that it furthers the purposes of the act.