Editor’s note: After nearly seven years of rarely missing a week, this is Danny’s last column for Civil Beat as a regular paid columnist. He’s been selected as a fellow with Pacific Resource Partnership’s Partners for Democracy program, part of the political training and networking effort closely affiliated with the Carpenters Union. We hope he continues to submit occasional guest essays but will no longer be part of our extended paid staff.
James Madison, one of the fathers of the U.S. Constitution, penned a letter to William T. Barry in 1822 expressing his support for a state-supported network of schools.
“A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both,” Madison wrote. “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
Like other founders, Madison idealized an enlightened public and was deeply concerned about the dangers of a reactionary, impassioned mob undermining the American experiment.
Today, some people would probably call Madison a “deep state elitist.” In 2025, America has become a farce and a tragedy where our national government has been reduced to reality TV show antics.
Social media network algorithms routinely amplify controversial, extreme or vulgar content, which in turn is often monetized, rewarding creators to post increasingly wild content. People don’t care about truth or enlightenment, they just care about views and likes now.
Artificial Intelligence has worsened this situation. Deepfakes, AI-generated images that mimic real persons, is a technology that ethics and regulation have yet to catch up with.
Just five years ago, AI-generated content looked crude and unrealistic. Today, AI is capable of producing extremely realistic-looking content, as well as closely mimicking the voices of real-life individuals.
Now you simply cannot trust your eyes or your ears when looking at online content. This is why in Gaza, Ukraine, Iran and other places around the world where active conflicts are taking place, both traditional media and volunteer social watchdogs now make it a point to geolocate and verify with supporting evidence purported content. Seeing something that is false, manipulated or even out of context can have serious implications for public safety and the integrity of governments and institutions.
That may, however, be exactly the reason some despotic regimes and bad faith actors want to capitalize on the use of deepfake technology. During the Covid pandemic, both China and Russia used bot farms to amplify deceptive content on social media to sow partisan chaos and destabilize Western governments. Before that, the Soviets made use in the 20th century of “agitprop,” or political propaganda, to agitate and disorient individuals into supporting or at least being sympathetic toward communism. Regimes without democracy enjoy using democratic systems against themselves to undermine legitimate governments and to sow discord among foreign populations.
No Blank Checks For Bad Faith Actors
The current era in American politics has seen the rise of something former Donald J. Trump confidant Steve Bannon has referred to as “flooding the zone with shit.” Is Sen. Ted Cruz the Zodiac Killer? Is former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton behind a pizza conspiracy? Did the State of Hawaii engage in a conspiracy to fake Barack Obama’s birth certificate to get him on the presidential ballot?
The answers really don’t matter to the people who spread these innuendos, lies and irresponsible claims, because the point of them is to force the mainstream media to waste time dispelling/explaining them and to make uninformed people believe lies. This is content meant to encourage you to waste time arguing over it while your institutions are stripped, dismantled and de-legitimized. And with AI, the ability to create deceptive images or video of people saying or doing things that they didn’t actually do is pure plutonium to the safety of our enlightened republic.
As a Christian conservative, I will tell you that there is an extreme hypocrisy among some of my Republican peers in which they are enthralled with a president who is constantly decrying “fake news” and is hypersensitive to even the slightest insult, and yet profits from an army of slanderers and a political propaganda asteroid belt that circles him as his royal guard.
Sorry, but you can’t call yourself a “conservative” and a “traditionalist” if you love spreading misinformation and lies. The founders who wrote the First Amendment assumed we would use it to speak the truth against liars and report facts to check tyrants. The Constitution is meant to enable the deeds of good citizens, not as a blank check for bad faith actors.
This is why Act 191 (2024) made it illegal in Hawaii to “recklessly distribute … materially deceptive media” for the purpose of “harming the reputation or electoral prospects of a candidate in an election or changing the voting behavior of voters in an election.”
I personally shouted “Hallelujah!” because it gives responsible citizens a guardrail against our system of government being undermined by lies. (You can read the 2023 article I wrote warning about the then-pending dangers of deepfake technology.)
The new law allows for criminal penalties against individuals who distribute deceptive media, and allows persons injured by deceptive media to file civil lawsuits for relief against distributors. They will not face punishment, however, if they include disclaimers stating, “the media has been manipulated by technical means and depicts appearance, speech, or conduct that did not occur.”
Hawaii is being sued over Act 191, with the plaintiffs arguing that “Our nation has a lengthy tradition of wide-open political discourse, including satire and parody of political candidates and elected officials.”
The Babylon Bee, which publishes tongue-in-cheek articles and social media posts that predominantly lean in favor of Donald Trump and conservatives, is leading the lawsuit against Hawaii. In theory, if it were to create deepfake images and not label them as such, Act 191 would place the person generating the content and the organization under criminal and legal risk.
The Babylon Bee’s legal representation, the Alliance Defending Freedom, contends in a press release that “The First Amendment doesn’t allow Hawaiʻi to choose what political speech is acceptable, and we are urging the court to cancel this unnecessary censorship.”
Not Free From The Consequences
Let’s think about that for a moment. Satire and parody are certainly legitimate forms of free expression, but when we get into the realm of making photo-realistic or life-like representations of individuals, the context of how they are used can change everything. If someone creates a deepfake photo of you robbing a bank, then writes an article without disclosing it as satire featuring that photo of you, that’s crossing into the territory of slander and libel.
Laws against slander and libel have different standards for persons who are perceived to be public personalities. But this does not mean that you have unlimited free rein under the First Amendment to create fake content just so you can pull down a public personality. You are free to express, but you are not free from the consequences of harming or deceiving people.
This is why people writing about investments have to make financial disclaimers, or why health advice is accompanied by medical disclaimers, and why certain professions can be held liable for giving “expert” advice that causes harm or loss.
So when we talk about the need to require a disclaimer on AI-generated content, anyone who thinks this is unreasonable should look at the bigger context of how the existing legal framework of expression and speech works in America.
We don’t allow people to campaign within a certain radius of a physical voting location. We don’t allow candidates to coordinate with political action committees. We don’t allow electioneering activities in federal or state buildings. We don’t allow people to wear their military uniform in campaign commercials without a disclaimer that says the images are not endorsed by the U.S. Department of Defense. We make tobacco companies place disclaimers on point-of-sale checkouts and their products.
Hawaii did a good thing by banning deceptive media. The truth is, the law doesn’t go far enough, because even content that is disclaimed and labeled as AI-generated will still find its way into the hands of rumor-spreaders and misinformation agents, but there’s little we can do about that. But it’s time to stop suggesting that the First Amendment gives us the power to obliterate truth and peddle intrigue. It does not. The founders wanted an enlightened citizenry, not an impassioned mob.
Surely if you’re a “comedy” publication like the Babylon Bee, you won’t be seriously inconvenienced by having to use labels on fake images or simulated videos produced by AI. That should be something any responsible comedian or publication would want.
