Responding to British Parliament’s enactment of the Coercive Acts in the American colonies, the first session of the Continental Congress convened at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, on September 5, 1774. Virginian Peyton Randolph (pictured) was appointed as the first president of Congress. John Adams, Patrick Henry, John Jay and George Washington were among the delegates.
Current law already “prohibits a candidate for federal office or an employee or agent of a candidate from fraudulently misrepresenting themselves, committee, or organization under their control,” the letter states, but candidates have already been caught using “Artificial Intelligence (AI) in campaign ads to depict themselves or another candidate engaged in an action that did not happen or saying something the depicted candidate did not say.”
OK. Regardless of the merit of current regulation, the apparent fact that some political actors have defied the rule (perhaps out of ignorance) doesn’t necessitate more legislation. Why not just let the wheels of justice, or what passes for it in the FEC realm, go on doing what they’re doing?
Because Elon Musk.
Specifically, his X (“Twitter”) platform recently launched “Grok‑2,” an AI for the creation of pictorial representations (not unlike those used here at ThisIsCommonSense.org). And, shock of shocks, there are no rules in place for ordinary people to take artistic license at those politicians they hate and and for those politicians they don’t.
As Ms. Camp notes, but the legislators don’t, most of these efforts have been for comic effect.
The Democrats don’t like this.
They request expeditious consideration for the creation, by the FEC, of new rules to “regulate” (suppress) AI by ordinary users to maintain the ostensible integrity of “our democracy.”
We have, Ms. Camp not unreasonably concludes, been pretty good at detecting “deep fakes” so far.
Besides, the big problem in politics is shallow fakes.
They’re everywhere. They’re called politicians.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
Anyone in the United States today who isn’t paranoid must be crazy.
Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers (1980).
Odoacer, a German “barbarian,” ousted Romulus Augustus, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, thus ending that empire on September 4, 476 A.D.
Many common people did not notice a change.
California lawmakers — apparently eager to help noncitizens vote — have banned local voter ID laws like that of Huntington Beach.
Attorney General Rob Bonta says that requiring ID to vote “flies in the face” of the principle that “the right to cast your vote is the foundation of our democracy.”
But Huntington Beach didn’t impair “the right to cast your vote.”
Opponents of ID requirements say that the problem is the terrible hardship of presenting a valid ID or perhaps of obtaining one. These may be chores, but they’re hardly ventures into the unknown. If you’re a citizen, you can get ID showing you are. And almost everyone is capable of pulling an ID out of a pocket and displaying it.
Here’s a tell: “An amendment to Senate Bill 1174 that would have explicitly banned illegal migrants from voting was rejected.”
Is there evidence of fraud in American elections?
Is it major — not a marginal issue having to do with one or two wayward ballots per decade?
Could lawmakers like California State Senator Dave Min, who asserts that “voter ID laws only subvert voter turnout,” be wrong?
Yes.
The evidence can be found in John Fund’s books, such as Our Broken Elections, Stealing Elections, and Who’s Counting? A more recent report of attempts to undermine the vote and prevent the same is Elizabeth Nickson’s article “The 2024 Cheat and What’s Being Done About It.”
Voter IDs don’t subvert voter turnout, they subvert fraudulent voter turnout.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Midjourney and Firefly
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
The idea that the inequalities of incomes can be greatly reduced has come to be recognized as largely impractical. Practically all endeavours at just distribution express more or less arbitrary conceptions of what is just and the central idea of Marxian socialism of a rationalisation of the means of production has been largely abandoned as technically impracticable. I believe that in general the idea of justice is more closely met by a freely competitive market than by any deliberate allocation of income to some imagined ideal of the kind.
Friedrich August von Hayek, as quoted in Alan Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography (2001).