Mohar Chatterjee

It happened: Congress passed an actual bill addressing Artificial Intelligence harms. Or an actual bill regulating online content. Either way, it was a rare event. Assuming President Donald Trump signs it, the Take It Down Act will create a federal mandate for tech platforms to remove nonconsensual AI-generated porn, offering new protections for victims at a time when the abuse of highly convincing “deepfake” imagery is rapidly growing. The problem with nonconsensual AI porn would seem obvious—though you could say that about a lot of problems with online content.

When Barack Obama mocked Donald Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes” at the Democratic National Convention this week, the audience went wild, and the internet made the moment go viral. But on Trump’s end, something else was also going on when he made his (false) assertions that Kamala Harris used artificial intelligence to inflate the crowd sizes in images of her rallies. AI might not have blown up politics the way some people worried it was going to.

For a while, it looked like AI was going to blow up campaign politics in 2024. Powerful new tools, new persuasion techniques, less policing of social-media platforms, all were leading up to a landscape transformed, maybe dangerously so.