House Democrats urge FEC to regulate X's Grok-2 over election deepfakes
House Democrats sent a letter to the Federal Election Commission requesting regulations to prohibit election deepfakes, citing concerns about Grok's uncensored image-generation capabilities and instances of AI-generated misleading images circulating online during the 2024 election cycle.
What happened
Seven House Democrats sent a letter to the Federal Election Commission on Monday requesting regulations prohibiting the creation of deepfakes of election candidates. The letter was prompted by Grok, an AI image generator released on X, which creates images of public figures with minimal content restrictions.
Reported impact
X users have used Grok to generate images including a heavily pregnant Kamala Harris with Donald Trump, and fake images of Taylor Swift fans endorsing Trump. The lawmakers stated that "the proliferation of deep-fake AI technology has the potential to severely misinform voters, causing confusion and disseminating dangerous falsehoods."
Index analysis
The letter noted that X had "developed no policies that would allow the platform to restrict images of public figures that could be potentially misleading." The Democrats referenced a 2023 petition from Public Citizen proposing that the FEC clarify that using deepfakes to "fraudulently misrepresent" rivals violates existing election law.
Governance controls
The lawmakers called on the FEC to adopt regulations prohibiting deepfake creation by candidates or their employees in campaign contexts. Public Citizen's petition suggested the FEC clarify that existing election law already prohibits candidates from using deepfakes to fraudulently misrepresent opponents.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.