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7/3/2025
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Bill to prohibit synthetic media 90 days before elections signed into law
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STATE HOUSE — Legislation sponsored by House Innovation and Technology Committee Chairwoman Jacquelyn Baginski and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Louis P. DiPalma to regulate the use of synthetic media in elections was signed into law Wednesday.
“Synthetic media” is defined as an image, an audio recording or a video recording of an individual’s appearance, speech or conduct that has been intentionally manipulated with the use of generative adversarial network techniques or other digital technology to create a realistic but false image, audio or video.
“Times have changed and technology that has the ability to create fake audio or video of political candidates becomes more convincing every single day. The creation of these recordings or video in order to fool voters is nothing but malicious deception and it has no place in free and fair elections. This bill will protect voters from falling for outright mistruths and lies while also protecting the First Amendment rights of digital creators,” said Chairwoman Baginski (D-Dist. 17, Cranston).
“Anyone can go online and see how far synthetic media has progressed in a rapid amount of time. All it takes is entering a sentence or two into a program and a realistic and false representation of a candidate for office can be created. This legislation will ensure that voters are not misled or fooled by malicious and fake media during election time,” said Chairman DiPalma (D-Dist. 12, Middletown, Little Compton, Newport, Tiverton).
The legislation (2025-H 5872A, 2025-S 0816A) would ban, within 90 days of an election, any person associated with a rival campaign from creating and publishing depictions of other candidates that, to a reasonable individual, appear to be a real individual in terms of appearance, action, or speech, but that did not occur in reality and present a fundamentally different understanding or impression of the appearance, action, or speech than a reasonable person would have from the unaltered, original version of the image, audio recording or video recording.
The prohibition would not apply if the creator of the image, audio recording or video recording includes a disclosure stating that the image has been manipulated or generated by artificial intelligence.
For more information, contact:
Tristan Grau, Publicist
State House Room B20
Providence, RI 02903
401.222.4935
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