Law / United States / 
Alabama
Distribution of Materially Deceptive Media to Influence an Upcoming Election
In force since .
An AI transparency rule binding public and private bodies.
- Obligation class
- Content labelling, Disclosure
- Audit expectation
- none
- Setting the rule reaches
- Elections
What it requires
- If you distribute AI-generated or AI-manipulated media that falsely depicts a candidate, and do so within 90 days of an election intending to harm that candidate's reputation or prospects or to change how electors vote, carry a clear and conspicuous disclaimer that the media has been manipulated by technical means and depicts speech or conduct that did not occur.
- The disclaimer has format-specific requirements: it must appear throughout a video, be read at the start and end of an audio-only piece, and be clearly visible on a still image, each in the language used in the media.
- A first violation is a Class A misdemeanor; a second or subsequent conviction within five years is a Class D felony.
- The Attorney General, the depicted individual, an affected candidate, or an entity representing voters can seek a permanent injunction against a violation, separately from any criminal charge.
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.
In the frameworks
- NIST AI RMF
- MEASURE 2.8Risks associated with transparency and accountability – as identified in the MAP function – are examined and documented.
- NIST AI 600-1
- GAI-RISK-07Human-AI Configuration
- GAI-RISK-08Information Integrity
- OWASP Agentic Top 10
- ASI09Human-Agent Trust Exploitation
- MIT mitigations Draft
- FINOS AIGF
- AIR-DET-021Agent Decision Audit and Explainability
- ETSI EN 304 223
Our reading of where this law's duties sit in each framework. It never says that running a control meets the law. How we read a framework against the law
Identifiers refer to ETSI EN 304 223 V2.1.1 (2025-12), © ETSI 2025, all rights reserved. ETSI owns the standard; no ETSI text (titles or sentences) is reproduced here. The standard is free to download from ETSI.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureYes
Private right of actionYes
Criminal exposure note
A violation of the distribution prohibition is a Class A misdemeanor; a second or subsequent conviction within five years is a Class D felony.
Who enforces it
Enforcement body
The Attorney General, a depicted individual, a candidate for office who has been injured or is likely to be injured, and an entity that represents the interests of voters likely to be deceived may each seek permanent injunctive relief (Ala. Code 17-5-16.1(g)(1)).
Settledness
- As of
- Open questions
- Does an image, audio or video that a person edited with an artificial intelligence tool, rather than generated with one, count as media that 'was produced by artificial intelligence' under Ala. Code 17-5-16.1(a)(5)c?
- Is the 'reasonable viewer or listener' in Ala. Code 17-5-16.1(a)(5)b measured against the audience the media was directed at or against the general public?
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Section 17-5-16.1 conditions the prohibition's safe harbor on a disclaimer accompanying the media, with format rules for video, audio, and still images. It states no duty to create, keep, or later produce a record of having made the disclosure, and no metadata content requirement of the kind Colorado's parallel deepfake-disclosure statute carries.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
A person may not knowingly distribute, or agree with another to distribute, materially deceptive media, defined as an image, audio, or video produced by artificial intelligence that falsely depicts a candidate engaging in speech or conduct that did not occur, within 90 days of an election, where the distribution intends to harm the candidate's reputation or electoral prospects or to change how electors vote.
The duty is a disclosure one: a distributor avoids the prohibition entirely by including a specified clear and conspicuous disclaimer that the media has been manipulated by technical means, with format-specific rules for video, audio, and still images. A violation is a Class A misdemeanor, rising to a Class D felony on a second or subsequent conviction within five years.
The Attorney General, the depicted individual, an injured or threatened candidate, or an entity representing voters may also seek permanent injunctive relief, with fee-shifting against a frivolous complaint. The codified section attributes the enactment to Act 2024-349, sections 1 to 3, which is the citation used here.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app generates audio with AI, generates images with AI or generates video with AI.
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