AUSTIN, Texas — Texas lawmakers have long promised to crack down on regulating artificial intelligence. With a slew of bills moving forward on Wednesday, some of their key regulatory priorities appear focused on explicit content, particularly generated by and of children, as well as election messaging.
Explicit content
The push behind explicit content is significantly bipartisan. On Thursday, a unanimous Senate approved a bill that would expand the legal definition of child pornography to include content developed by artificial intelligence or cartoon depictions of explicit content involving minors.
“As Texas enters the digital age, our state must be very careful about our approach to artificial intelligence,” Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said in a statement. “With the proliferation of AI-generated pornography, steps must be taken to protect Texans, and specifically children, from harmful computer-generated content and the crimes that arise from it.”
Senate Bill 20 from Republican Pete Flores creates a felony offense for the possession of explicit depictions of minors, “whether the depiction is of an actual child, cartoon or animation, or an image created using AI or other computer software.”
In the Texas House of Representatives, two similar bills from Democrat Mary Gonzalez were heard before the House Committee on Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence, largely putting the regulatory onus on the deep fake generators themselves.
House Bill 581 requires such generators to use age verification to ensure that their users are adults; similarly, it requires generators to ensure that “anyone depicted in an image is over 18.” House Bill 421 would require those generators to receive consent from anyone depicted in explicit videos.
“If we don’t come up with a solution, we have to wait two more years while kids still have access to this technology, and that’s a lot of kids who could potentially or are currently being harmed,” Rep. Gonzalez said before the committee on Wednesday.
Rep. Ann Johnson, D-Houston, who is Vice Chair of the committee, said Texas is “so far behind on regulations with regard to AI in a way that protects minors.”
Election messaging
In an entirely different field, former House Speaker, now Beaumont Representative, Dade Phelan laid out a bill for the first time in four years that would require any political messaging that uses “altered” imagery, including artificial intelligence or deep fakes, to disclose that it its doing so.
The bill has drawn criticism from critics of Phelan, saying the bill would impact some of the humorous Texas legislative accounts on social media creating memes depicting Phelan and others.
“I’m not coming for your memes, if you like your memes you can keep your memes,” Phelan said before the House state Affairs committee on Wednesday. “This has nothing to do with X, or Facebook, or anything on social media.”
Despite that, Phelan noted that the bill will likely be substituted to take in other considerations, meaning some of the details of the legislation will change before it’s passed.