California Looks to Boost Deepfake Protections Before Elections

California lawmakers are exploring legislation to further crack down on deepfakes, including broader bans of the use of artificial intelligence in political campaigns and in pornography that are used for such nefarious purposes.

California already leads the nation on this issue, being one of the first states to pass anti-deepfake legislation in 2019 before the current frenzy over AI. Since then, fewer than a dozen states have enacted guardrails on the technology, most recently Michigan last month. Deepfakes are images or videos of a person’s likeness that have been digitally manipulated to typically misrepresent the person.

The Golden State’s law ...