Why Arizona’s “Mother, May I?” Bill Failed

State Representative Nick Kupper on the floor of the Arizona House of Representatives prior to the sine die of the second session of the 57th State Legislature at the Arizona State Capitol building in Phoenix, Arizona.

​What Thomas Nast was to the age of 19th-century political cartooning, AI is becoming to modern political satire. We’ve all come across AI-generated shorts that depict realistic looking political figures – AOC, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, J.D. Vance – saying and doing absurd things.  
 
The Babylon Bee’s “We Asked AI to Predict What Will Happen Now that Elon Musk Is a Trillionaire” is a sterling example of how this technology can allow Americans to engage in a pastime as old as the Republic – ridiculing public figures. And if the satire is broad enough, no one mistakes these shorts for the real thing.
 
But the same technology that can ridicule a politician can also take the image of a woman – whether she’s an ex-girlfriend or a celebrity – and create what appears to be an image of her acting out hardcore porn.
 
Republican Arizona state Rep. Nick Kupper set out to do something about this by outlawing revenge porn and other AI-generated sexual depictions of underage victims, as well as of adults who have not given their consent. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, vetoed his bill, claiming in a statement that the bill’s sponsor said in committee that the “legislation’s intent is to require the consent of an elected official before they are satirized on a show like South Park.”
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Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project, told the Tucson Sentinel that the bill’s definition of “synthetic” content – any visual depiction altered or created using AI or digital technology – is vague and could encompass parody, satire, or public-interest citizen reporting.
 
“That introduces a whole new host of issues that will create a gigantic burden for speech that is happening on a lot of very big platforms that allow sexual content,” Ruane said, referencing websites such as Reddit, Bluesky, and X. “It will be up to the whims of political actors to determine what content is covered by sexual content that is harmful to minors …
 
“What we're dealing with here is the potential for significant jawboning, essentially, on the part of motivated politicians who wish to erase certain speech from the internet,” Ruane said. “What you could get is just gigantic blocking of content.”

In other words, the bill could create a “Mother, May I?” standard for seeking permission from politicians before satirizing them on sites where one could also find some types of sexual material (basically, the same standard as any of the major streaming channels).
 
For her part, Gov. Hobbs says that Arizona law and the federal Take It Down Act already protect Arizonans. The governor also says that she reached out to the Rep. Kupper to sharpen the bill, only to be rebuffed.
 
For his part, Rep. Kupper told The Center Square that the governor’s statements are misleading and that his bill is an improvement over the Take It Down Act in that it would prevent offending material from being uploaded – not merely allow it to be punished with criminal charges and civil remedies later.
 
“Once it’s uploaded, the harm has been done to the individual who’s in the content,” Rep. Kupper said.
 
Whether or not courts would find that clause to be prior restraint – forbidden under First Amendment law – the culling of content before it is posted seems to us to validate Ruane’s concern about overreach. Blocking content could incentivize platforms to censor anything that smacks of synthetic material, leading to political jawboning and “the gigantic blocking of content.”
 
Perhaps the two politicians should get together to discuss a better approach – before someone satirizes them.

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