Kamala Harris AI video creator sues California over Newsom deepfake law

The creator of a viral July post on X that used artificial intelligence to mock Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign is suing to block a California law regulating political AI and deepfakes.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) signed AB 2839 into law in an attempt to keep AI-aided political disinformation out of the election. The law makes “materially deceptive audio or visual media of a candidate” illegal 120 days before an election and 60 days after an election.

Immediately after Newsom signed the bill, Christopher Kohls filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California to kill the law, claiming it was an abuse of “state power to force private social media companies to censor private citizens’ speech by purging election-related AI-generated content.”

Kohls's post used AI-generated audio clips of Harris’s voice, making it seem as if she was mocking herself, saying she was the “ultimate diversity hire” and if you criticize what she says, you’re both “sexist and racist.”

X owner Elon Musk shared the video to his 198.2 million followers on the platform on July 28.

Newsom responded with a screenshot of the ad and an announcement that he was planning to sign the law.

"Manipulating a voice in an 'ad' like this one should be illegal," Newsom wrote . "I’ll be signing a bill in a matter of weeks to make sure it is."

“Safeguarding the integrity of elections is essential to democracy, and it’s critical that we ensure AI is not deployed to undermine the public’s trust through disinformation — especially in today’s fraught political climate,” Newsom said Tuesday in a statement .

The AI voice sounds like Harris, and Kohls said he hopes it will lessen her chances of winning in November. The lawsuit claims the plaintiff has an “absolute Constitutional right to lampoon politicians he believes should not be elected.”

Kohls argued that his post was labeled as a “campaign AD parody,” which he believed was protected by the bill.

Past political parodies have always used real people to represent others, such as Maya Rudolph playing Harris on Saturday Night Live, rather than artificial intelligence.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Memes, parody, and comedy are excluded from the regulation so long as there is a clear description within the video about what type of content it is. The bill requires the word “parody” to be written in font the size of other text in the video for the viewer to recognize immediately that the video is not real, no matter where it is shared.

However, Kohls's post only included the word "parody" in the caption, leaving the video itself unmarked.