California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law last month that is one of the most restrictive infringements on free speech ever attempted in America. He banned so-called “deepfakes” related to politicians and political campaigns. The law criminalizes AI-generated memes and videos as “misinformation.”
The internet decided it wasn’t going to take this blatantly unconstitutional law lying down. Elon Musk’s Grok AI was immediately put to work churning out memes of Gavin Newsom. Everyone was basically daring him to charge them with a speech crime, because we all know the law will be overturned the first time it ends up in a courtroom.
Newsom’s argument is that Americans are too stupid to recognize memes and parody videos and this will change the way they vote. One person tweeted a meme of Gavin Newsom riding a unicorn that was farting rainbows in response to that argument.
Newsom also claims that the law protects parody and satire. Yet the very first person who was charged under the new law had created an AI-generated ad that mimicked Kamala Harris’s voice, which clearly had the word “PARODY” in its title in all caps.
That person sued to challenge the law and a judge has already stayed it, calling it an outrageous breach of the First Amendment that chills all speech, including parody and satire.
Not to be outdone, the Babylon Bee jumped into the action and dared Newsom to charge them under the law with this incredible deepfake campaign ad:
