US senators propose curbs on AI-generated election deception - Biometric Update

In the lead-up to the 2024 New Hampshire presidential primary, voters received robocalls featuring an AI-generated voice mimicking President Joe Biden. The calls falsely urged recipients to stay home and save their vote for the November election, marking one of the most prominent early examples of generative AI being used to influence an American election. New Hampshire officials eventually traced the calls to Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom, leading the Federal Communications Commission to reach a $1 million settlement with Lingo regarding the transmission of the fraudulent messages.

What happened

The incident involved the deployment of synthetic audio technology to impersonate a high-ranking public official with the intent to suppress voter participation. This event served as a catalyst for a group of Senate Democrats to introduce the Fraudulent Artificial Intelligence Regulations Elections Act (FAIR). Introduced by Sens. Jeff Merkley and Alex Padilla, the bill aims to curb the distribution of false AI-generated content—including text, images, audio, and video—that contains materially false information about federal elections or falsely depicts election officials. The legislation seeks to grant the Justice Department civil authority to seek injunctive relief against bad actors who knowingly distribute such content to intimidate voters or harass election workers. Beyond AI-generated disinformation, the proposed legislation also addresses the use of unreliable, scraped, or mismatched data in mass voter challenges, aiming to protect eligible voters from being improperly removed from registration rolls. By defining qualifying data sets for voter eligibility verification, the bill attempts to mitigate the impact of automated tools that have been used to generate large numbers of voter challenges since 2020.