Political satire website The Babylon Bee has filed a lawsuit against New Mexico, challenging the state’s law prohibiting the use of AI to create satires of political issues without incorporating a warning label. The law threatens to fine violators up to $20,000.
“We’re used to getting pulled over by the joke police, but comedy isn’t a crime,” said Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon. “The First Amendment protects our right to create AI satire poking fun at political candidates. We’ll never stop fighting to defend that freedom.”
The Babylon Bee is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom. According to the lawsuit, “New Mexico’s law empowers Defendants to do exactly what the First Amendment was ratified to prohibit: punish core political speech for no reason other than that they disapprove it.” While the state’s law claims to block “materially deceptive media,” the policy’s definition of such content “sweeps in some of the most important forms of political speech—satire, parody, and political cartoon—long cherished in our constitutional tradition. These forms include content that is literally false, even as they employ exaggeration, overstatement, or inversion to communicate a true (and often vital) message.”
The law at the center of the legal action, HB 182, defines “materially deceptive media” as an “image, video, or audio” that “depicts an individual engaged in conduct or speech in which the depicted individual did not engage,” material that was “as published, disseminated, distributed or displayed to the public without the consent of the depicted individual,” and “was produced in whole or in part by using artificial intelligence.”
The Babylon Bee previously filed a lawsuit over California’s “deepfake” law. In that filing, the satire group similarly argued that the requirement to post a warning label defeated the purpose of satire. The “deepfake” law was later found unconstitutional and was struck down.
