(The Center Square) – The pitch from Pennsylvania Rep. Chris Pielli to fellow lawmakers about his bill is straightforward – “If it is AI, it has to say it is AI” – but there is nothing straightforward about the bill’s prospects.
The proposal from Pielli, a Chester County Democrat, is dubbed the Artificial Intelligence Transparency in Advertising Act. It essentially makes it illegal to disseminate advertising with AI-generated content without labelling it as such. The bill was approved in the House in a 124-78 vote on Wednesday, with 22 Republicans joining all Democrats in support.
It now goes to the Senate for consideration.
Pielli, a lawyer who joined the state House in early 2023, has been trying to get the concept into law for much of his tenure. A similar bill he sponsored passed the House in 2024 and died in the Senate.
And, as was the case in the 2023-24 session, the Senate is majority Republicans and the House majority Democrats.
On Thursday, the chairwoman of a Senate committee that may consider the latest Pielli bill, Sen. Tracy Pennycuick, said she had not yet seen its specific language.
In general, she said, the concept is important.
“Consumers need to know when a product or an advertisement has been manipulated using AI,” said Pennycuick, chairwoman of the Communications & Technology Committee.
A roughly similar bill, though, has already passed through Pennycuick’s committee and then received full Senate approval, all within the past six weeks. That bill, sponsored by Sen. Nick Pisciottano of Allegheny County and dubbed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act, was awaiting consideration in a House committee this week as the Pielli bill got its final vote.
That dynamic made it appear the Senate favors one bill and the House favors the other.
Pennycuick said she would be concerned about any legislation that uses a broad brush, requiring labels or consumer notices on just about every piece of advertising. That, she said, would make the labels so common that no one would read them.
“You have got to be careful on labelling everything, or you are labelling nothing,” she said.
Among the Republicans in the House who voted “no” on the Pielli bill Wednesday was Rep. Mark Gillen of Berks County. Some of its wording, he said in an interview, was ambiguous and could lead to implicating people who did not intend to deceive or mislead. And, he said, violations would be punished via steep financial penalties already enshrined in unfair trade practices law.
“I am not sure that is appropriate, given the lack of clarity in this legislation,” Gillen said.
In a separate interview, Pielli on Thursday discussed both his bill and the one passed in the Senate. The latter, he said, is “a watered-down version of our bill.”
He noted that it uses a $3,000 fine as punishment for a violation.
“That’s not a deterrent,” Pielli said. “They will gladly pay that. That’s not a deterrent for bad actors.”
His bill, he said, allowed for the “third party right to sue.” That, Pielli said, is “a real deterrent.”
