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ST. PAUL, Minn. (GRAY) – With an election rapidly approaching, a new Minnesota law aims to limit the spread of disinformation via artificial intelligence. In 2023, the North Star State passed sweeping regulations on deepfakes, AI technology used to create fake videos of real people doing things. The 2023 law banned the use of deepfakes to produce non-consensual sexual content and to mislead voters in an election.

With a year to think about the new law, lawmakers in St. Paul returned to the capitol ready to make some changes. Those changes passed with broad bipartisan support and went into effect on July 1.

“This year, we came back and we took some time to think about [whether] this bill is doing exactly what we wanted to do, and making sure, before we go into an election season, that it’s as tight as possible, " said Senator Erin Maye Quade (DFL-Apple Valley).

Changes to the law centered mainly around the elections provisions.

“We wanted to clarify that it’s [for deepfakes] meant to influence an election. So the creation and dissemination of a deepfake itself is not the crime. It’s [one] meant to influence an election, and there’s also a higher threshold of intent, so it has to be malicious intent,” she said.

Clarifying intent, according to Maye Quade, ought to quell concerns about the law impacting the wrong people.

The new changes also force a candidate to forfeit their office or nomination if they knowingly distribute a deepfake that goes against the law.

The state also changed the timeline for the election provisions—originally within 90 days of an election, the law became more specific with its timeline.

“[We changed] the timeline under which it is illegal to disseminate a deepfake, to influence an election, injure a candidate, and that is when early voting starts,” Maye Quade said.

The initial bill and this year’s changes both had broad support across the board.

“Seeing what can be done with these deep fakes is pretty disturbing for the most part. So there was pretty broad bipartisan support,” said Representative Nolan West (R-Blaine).

West was a proponent of both bills. Like Maye Quade, he sees these provisions as a good starting point for legislating AI. Still, some of West’s Republican colleagues worried that the law is too ambiguous on still-edited images.

“It’s a good baseline. I mean, we’ll see if eventually a case will probably come up, and then rubber meets the road. We’ll really find out how it works,” said West, “I think, particularly if somebody’s going to get after the Photoshop aspect that’s been done in campaigns for a long time, that’ll get interesting really quick.”