How the legal landscape is changing for AI

Legislatures in 41 states passed more than 100 laws governing artificial intelligence last year, according to an analysis by New York University, and a number of those laws took effect Wednesday.

California — the home of Silicon Valley — leads the way with half a dozen new AI laws on the books Jan. 1. Several require more transparency for AI-generated content, said Marian Waldmann Agarwal at law firm Morrison Foerster.

“You know, you don’t want any person or any company to be using artificial intelligence in a deceptive way,” she said.

The use of AI-generated or digitally altered content in political ads, for instance, must now be labeled. 

A pair of laws seeking to limit election-related deepfakes and hold social media platforms responsible for their distribution are currently tied up in court over First Amendment concerns.

But the state does now ban sexually explicit deepfakes. “We see a lot of laws also related to child pornography and child safety and making sure that AI is captured within those laws,” she said.

Attorney Arsen Kourinian at Mayer Brown said the home of Hollywood also has new protections for creative performers.

“Companies can’t just generate AI content using somebody’s image and put it on products for commercial uses,” Kourinian said.

State law now mandates more clarity in contracts around the use of digital likenesses, and it also requires that performers have professional legal representation. 

A second law prohibits companies from using digital replicas of a deceased celebrity without permission from their estate. “Basically what this does is codifies it in a separate statute specifically related to AI,” Kourinian said.

State governments are likely to play an even bigger role in AI regulation during the second Donald Trump administration, said Scott Babwah Brennen at NYU’s Center on Technology Policy.

“He seems to be suggesting that he’ll take a more sort of deregulatory stance and might be much slower to enact, you know, a new sort of AI regulation at the federal level,” he said.

While the pace of federal regulation may slow down, the speed of technological change that challenges our nation’s laws won’t.