In what he acknowledged was a bit of a "stunt," Newsom signed bills aimed at reining in "deepfakes" in election ads during an interview with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on the first day of the event in downtown San Francisco, which bills itself this year as the largest AI conference in the world.
The bills require large social media sites to label or remove election-related deepfakes, ban unlabeled deepfakes of candidates 120 days before an election, and require disclosures when political advertising is generated using AI.
Newsom said misleading deepfake ads imitating Vice President Kamala Harris on the social media site X and egged on by the site's owner Elon Musk prompted him to sign the legislation.
Earlier Tuesday, Newsom posted a video on Instagram with actors union president Fran Drescher announcing that he had signed two bills to limit the ability of movie studios and other entertainment companies to use AI-generated versions of human performers without proper consent.
His appearance with Drescher highlights the political tightrope he must walk when it comes to AI regulation. Labor unions, a key support base for Democrats like Newsom, have pushed for regulation of the industry, arguing it threatens human workers' jobs. But tech companies, who have also long been allies of the governor's, have sought to narrow or scrap proposed regulations they argue will stifle innovation.
Newsom characterized all the bills he signed Tuesday as "surgical." During his conversation with Benioff, the governor also tipped his hand on how he might act on SB1047, authored by State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, which is arguably the most consequential AI bill currently on his desk.
He contrasted the bills he signed Tuesday with SB1047, which he suggested might have a "chilling" effect on the AI industry, echoing arguments that big AI companies and small startups have consistently made against the legislation.
SB1047 would require large AI programs of a kind that mostly don't exist yet and that cost more than $100 million to train to undergo safety testing and come with emergency "kill switches" should they run amok. It would also empower the state attorney general to sue companies that cause major harm.
Newsom said there are around three dozen AI-related bills awaiting his signature, many of which are not nearly as broad in their scope and effect as SB1047.
But he said unlike those dozens of other AI bills, SB 1047 "has created its own weather system," adding "I don't know if a lot of people have read it...but a lot of people have feelings about it."
The governor said he wanted to maintain California's lead as the epicenter of AI, but he was still considering how to regulate the technology, asking "what are the demonstrable risks of AI and what are the hypothetical risks?"
Companies that make AI programs, including Meta, OpenAI, as well as many smaller startups that rely on their technology, have come out strongly against the bill. Many startups rely on free open-source AI software like the Llama bots made by Meta on which to build their applications.
Meta has hosted events to rally startups in San Francisco against the bill. Wiener on Tuesday hosted a virtual press conference that included the National Organization for Women along with youth groups and doctors urging Newsom to sign the bill into law by the Sept. 30 deadline.
Wiener has said the state attorney general would only go after AI programs that cause catastrophic harms including those that create more than $500,00,000 in damages.
But Meta and the startup community have cried foul, saying if they face civil liability for what a program they build might do, particularly in someone else's hands, they will stop building and using AI or leave the state altogether.
Newsom echoed those concerns during the interview with Benioff, saying he was mindful of "the chilling effect...on the open source community that legislation could have."
"I'm processing that," he said.
© 2024 the San Francisco Chronicle. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
