“As the 2024 Presidential election quickly approaches, it is imperative that the FEC allow comment on Public Citizen’s petition for rulemaking,” the letter said.
This is the second Public Citizen petition asking for FEC rules on AI-generated political ads, and Thursday’s vote was 6-0. In June, the commission deadlocked on the matter. The three Republican commissioners on the six-person panel voted against the request, saying the petition contained technical omissions. GOP Commissioner Allen Dickerson said the FEC does not have the power to regulate such ads and called on Congress to expand the FEC’s authority.
On Thursday, Dickerson said Public Citizen’s new petition complied with regulations, and he voted to continue the process. But he also said that he remains unconvinced that making such rules is within the commission’s mandate.
The current law “prohibits a person [from] fraudulently misrepresenting himself as acting for or on behalf of another candidate,” Dickerson said.
“There is nothing special about deepfakes or generative AI, the buzzwords of the day,” he added. “It doesn’t matter how the fraud was committed. Lying about someone’s private conversations, or posting a doctored document, or adding sound effects in post-production, or manually airbrushing a photo, if intentional to cheat, will violate our law.
