North Carolina lawmakers on Tuesday advanced a proposal to regulate videos created using artificial intelligence.
The House Committee on Regulatory Reform gave preliminary approval to House Bill 934, which would make it a crime to distribute audio or video of someone “acting in a manner that the person did not actually speak or act.” These deceptive audio and video clips are often referred to as “deepfakes.”
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Violating the rules outlined in House Bill 934 would be a Class 1 misdemeanor, potentially resulting in prison time. The bill would also enable deepfake victims to sue those who distribute the footage to recover $1,000 in damages each time the footage is redistributed.
The bipartisan proposal comes amid rising concerns about artificial intelligence tools, which are capable of creating fake footage of people that looks authentic. The technology has been used to deceive voters ahead of elections. It has also been used in scams to defraud North Carolinians. WRAL News reported Monday on a Pittsboro resident who mistakenly paid thousands of dollars to a scammer who posed as her grandson.
State Rep. Jake Johnson, a Polk County Republican who’s sponsoring the bill, described it as a work-in-progress.
Johnson said he remains in discussions with tech industry leaders about the best terminology to use in the legislation so that it doesn’t have unintended consequences that might scare off businesses.
“What we don't want to do is overregulate to where North Carolina gets a bad reputation for (being) a bad place to do business developing or selling this technology,” he said.
For an example of how Johnson wants to fine-tune his legislation, he pointed to political attack ads. Using artificial intelligence to create background images or video in an attack ad should be allowed, he said. However, it should be against the law to use AI to create fake videos of people saying something they didn’t actually say.
“That’s what we're trying to home in: defining what is the main content, or the primary content of the ad,” Johnson said.
House Bill 934, which goes next to a House judiciary committee, is not the only legislative proposal seeking to regulate artificially-generated content.
A separate bill, House Bill 375, would introduce harsher penalties for people using AI to generate pornography. It also would require political candidates or groups to place disclaimers on their AI-generated ads if published within 90 days of an election. The proposal has yet to come up for a vote.
Both bills — House Bill 974 and House Bill 375 — still need approval from the House, the Senate, and Gov. Josh Stein to become law. Last year, state legislators filed similar bills that failed to reach the governor’s desk.
A bill that would’ve required political groups to place disclaimers on their AI-generated ads passed the House of Representatives unanimously before dying in the Senate. A bill filed that would have banned deepfakes in political ads never came up for a vote.