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MichaelMacKayFirstPaper 4 - 08 May 2025 - Main.EbenMoglen
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"Deepfake" or Cheap Take?—Keep Vermont Weird. | | | The Unafraid Approach
Across the country, in a smaller state, a candidate ran for mayor of Cheyenne as an AI avatar. His campaign last year was unsuccessful, but his positive message on technology was successful in other respects (overcoming a now failed piece of legislation resembling S.23). In the end, no matter how Vermonters—whether activists, campaign managers, or other volunteers—choose to use "AI," they are still humans, and there are already laws for people on the books. As with any new technology, there are always unknowns, but as with this bill, fear of the unknown seems to have led state senators to restrict AI-generated content "90 days" before an election, as California had also attempted back in 2019. But fear is no friend of the freedom of speech, and Vermont's House should reject the bill that the state senate passed in late March. Surely, if there is an “uncanny valley” in the Green Mountains, then state lawmakers should keep Vermont weird. | |
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I think this is rather a heavy load of words for a proposed state law that is almost certainly not going anywhere. | | | | |
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> | Surely the real question is why one kind of software tool is rationally discriminable from another. Is it okay to use a photo editor to modify photographs but not an image generator? If not, at what point could photo editing pass from being acceptable to unacceptable? Is the intention to deceive the relevant point, in which case these are false advertising statutes. Or could an information graphic conveying accurate information produced by an image generator be forbidden because of the nature of the software used to make it?
It seems evident that tools are neither the issue nor an appropriate subject of regulation of speech, political or otherwise. Why not make that argument out with due economy of words, and move from it to some larger idea?
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