California Bans Election ‘Deepfakes,’ Celebrates Biological Ones

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) on Tuesday signed a law immediately banning the sharing of election-related “deepfake” videos, images, or audio, enforceable up to 120 days before an election and 60 days after an election. He also signed two more laws, which take effect in January, requiring disclaimers on AI-generated political ads and requiring social media companies to remove deepfakes, or else courts will force them to do so.

The first bill was drafted in response to an altered video of Kamala Harris, which Elon Musk shared in July. In the video, AI-generated audio mimicked Harris’s voice and appeared to show her admitting President Joe Biden’s senility and that she is the “ultimate diversity hire.”

The term “deepfake” describes electronic media that has been manipulated, altered, or entirely fabricated, but which is so true to life that it deceives people into thinking it is real. Concerns over political deepfakes reflect the rapid progress in artificial intelligence technology, which has only recently become capable of generating content that could be mistaken for the real thing.

California’s deepfake legislation is controversial, with free speech advocates arguing it goes too far in the direction of censorship by restricting parody.

For his part, Newsom responded, “I could care less if it was Harris or Trump. It was just wrong on every level.” The nugget of truth, nearly obscured under Newsom’s characteristically hypocritical authoritarianism, is that deepfake videos can be deceptive, harming both the viewer and the subject. In a political election, deepfake videos can deceive voters, causing them to cast ballots based on false information. Deepfake videos can also harm the subject of the altered media by misrepresenting what that person said or believes — a form of bearing false witness.

My purpose here is not to litigate the debate between these two arguments, nor explore various compromises that could address the concerns of each. Instead, I write to demonstrate the contrast between California’s aggressive pursuit of one form of technological deepfake (electronic) and their unquestioning embrace of another form of technological deepfake (biological).

For that is what gender transition procedures are: a biological deepfake. They manipulate the human body, alter it, and in some cases fabricate replicas of entire organs. And, as with AI-generated deepfakes online, recent technological advancements make these biological deepfakes increasingly hard for the casual observer to distinguish from reality.

Transgender ideologues and medical practitioners who profit from gender transition procedures would object vehemently to this assessment. To people confused about their gender, they promise that certain medical procedures will, effectively, make their body like the body of the opposite sex. But it isn’t true.

This is most obvious in the area of human reproduction (that is, sexual reproduction), which requires the combination of distinctive types of cells (gametes) from both a male (sperm) and female (egg) to form a new, living organism. For all the technological advancements in gender transition procedures, scientists have yet to offer a procedure that would allow a biological female to produce sperm or a biological male to produce an egg. The closest they can come to reversing a human body’s sexual biology is to disable it; consent forms for gender transition procedures acknowledge “irreversible infertility” as a possible side-effect.

Gender transition procedures also fail to alter a body’s fundamental hormone mix. Scientists cannot make male bodies produce the hormones of a female body or vice versa. The closest they can come is to give someone regular doses of cross-sex hormones, on which they will remain dependent for the rest of their lives. This covers over a person’s natural hormones without fundamentally rewriting their body’s sexuality. Painting a cement wall with a brick pattern or woodgrain pattern does not make it a brick wall or wooden wall.

Yet California has aggressively welcomed these biological deepfakes. They will subsidize gender transition procedures through state-funded insurance plans. They will aid minors in obtaining these procedures, despite the life-altering consequences. They will even take custody of minors whose parents are unwilling to sign off on these procedures, even for families in other states. They require school officials to help minors to transition, even if it involves lying to their parents.

California will ban a video of Kamala Harris altered to say that she is the “ultimate diversity hire.” But it smiles on a boy altering his bodily appearance to say, “I’m a girl.” But both are equally untrue. Both are deepfakes.