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Law / United States / Kentucky

Synthetic Media Disclosure in Electioneering Communications

KRS 117.322

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 a communication you sponsor about a candidate for elective office alters that candidate's appearance, action, or speech through synthetic media, include a disclosure that is clear and conspicuous and placed in or alongside the content so a user is likely to notice it.
  • A candidate depicted this way may seek an injunction requiring that disclosure and may recover attorney's fees and costs if they prevail.
  • The medium distributing the communication and its advertising sales representative are not liable unless they intentionally remove a required disclosure or, intending to deceive, alter content so that it becomes synthetic media.
  • Failing to comply with a court's order to add the disclosure is a Class D felony.

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
OWASP Agentic Top 10
  • ASI09Human-Agent Trust Exploitation
MIT mitigations Draft
  • 2.4Content Safety Controls
  • 4.1System Documentation
  • 4.2Risk Disclosure
  • 4.6User Rights & Recourse
FINOS AIGF
ETSI EN 304 223
  • 5.1.3-2Threats developers cannot resolve are passed to operators and on to end-users.
  • 5.3.1-1Users told where and how their data is used, accessed and stored, with developers informing operators.
  • 5.3.1-2.1That guidance covers proper use, limits and likely failure modes.

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

Failure to comply with a court's order under KRS 117.322 to include the required disclosure is subject to the penalties in KRS 121.990(3) for a violation of KRS 121.190(1), which classifies the violation as a Class D felony.

Who enforces it

Enforcement body

A candidate for elected office whose appearance, action, or speech is altered through synthetic media, suing the sponsor in the Circuit Court of the county where the candidate resides; the section names no public enforcer.

Settledness

As of
Open questions
  • Does an electioneering communication that alters a candidate's appearance or speech with a generative model other than a generative adversarial network count as synthetic media under KRS 117.001(20)(a)1?
  • Does an altered still image of a candidate fall under KRS 117.322(1)(a), given that KRS 117.001(20)(a)1 defines synthetic media as an audio recording or video recording?

What it makes you log

Logging duty

The disclosure duty runs to the audience of the electioneering communication, at the moment it is distributed. Nothing in this section requires the sponsor, the medium, or any other person to keep a log, record, or file of a communication's creation, its use of synthetic media, or the disclosure given.

Kind
None
As of

What this law does

Drafted with AI

Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page. How this site is made

Research summary

Legal information, not legal advice. This is LexLint's own research summary of a public legal source, and it creates no attorney-client relationship. For decisions that matter, consult qualified counsel in the relevant jurisdiction. About LexLint

Created by 2025 Ky. Acts ch. 66 (Senate Bill 4) and effective , the same emergency-clause Act that also directs Commonwealth-agency AI governance, KRS 117.322 lets a candidate for elected office whose appearance, action, or speech is altered through synthetic media in an electioneering communication seek an injunction or other equitable relief against the communication's sponsor requiring a disclosure that is clear and conspicuous and placed in or alongside the content so a user is likely to notice it, and lets a prevailing plaintiff recover attorney's fees and costs.

The medium disseminating the communication and its advertising sales representative are not liable except where they intentionally remove a required disclosure or, intending to deceive, alter content so that it becomes synthetic media, and an interactive computer service keeps its federal Communications Decency Act section 230 exemption. It is an affirmative defense that the communication already carries the required disclosure.

Failing to comply with a court's order to include the disclosure is punishable as a Class D felony under KRS 121.990(3). The section was amended again by 2026 Ky. Acts ch. 161, effective .

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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