Popular Christian satire site The Babylon Bee has sued New Mexico officials over a new law that requires warning labels to be put on any AI-generated political satire.
The lawsuit comes after the site circulated a video featuring an AI-generated clip of New Mexico Supreme Court Justice David K. Thomson, depicting him announcing a ruling by the state’s high court against “the Second Amendment, the First Amendment” and other constitutional protections, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican.
Filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico, the complaint takes aim at New Mexico’s House Bill 182, which bans AI-created satire of political candidates or issues unless they have a state-mandated disclaimer.
According to the complaint, the state ban is applicable all year and not just during election seasons, includes both online and offline content, and carries fines of up to $20,000 for violators.
Defendants named in the lawsuit include the members of the New Mexico State Ethics Commission, with Commission Chair Celia Foy Castillo listed as the first defendant.
“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,” the lawsuit states. “New Mexico’s law purports to restrict ‘materially deceptive media,’ yet its definition sweeps in some of the most important forms of political speech — satire, parody, and political cartoon — long cherished in our constitutional tradition.”
The Babylon Bee is being represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a nonprofit legal group that has successfully argued First Amendment cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
“New Mexico is censoring political speech it dislikes. We should not trust the government to decide what is true in our political debates,” said ADF Legal Counsel Logan Spena in a statement last week. “The Babylon Bee is seeking to uphold its fundamental right to speak freely and ensure that our political system remains one of self-government. We’re proud to have successfully represented the Bee in two other cases challenging state censorship, and we’ll strive for a similar outcome in New Mexico.”
Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon said the site has no plans to alter its content regardless of the law. “We’re used to getting pulled over by the joke police, but comedy isn’t a crime,” Dillon said. “The First Amendment protects our right to create AI satire poking fun at political candidates. We’ll never stop fighting to defend that freedom.”
Dillon told Fox News the lawsuit was filed preemptively. “The concern is real, but we don’t censor ourselves,” he said. “If a joke we want to tell is likely to violate the law, we’ll tell it, anyway, both because we have a right to, and we refuse to do the tyrant’s work for him. If penalties are imposed, we’ll sue to defend our rights. In this case, we’re suing preemptively to settle the matter before it escalates to that point.”
A spokesperson for the New Mexico State Ethics Commission called the lawsuit baseless in a statement to Bloomberg Law. “The Commission has never taken action to enforce the AI-disclaimer requirements in Section 1-19-26.4 of the Campaign Reporting Act, much less for political parody and satire,” the spokesperson said.
The complaint also notes that Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham flagged portions of the bill as ambiguous when she signed it into law in 2024, and that state Attorney General Raul Torrez separately concluded the disclaimer requirement was likely unconstitutional as applied to satire and parody.
State Rep. Charlotte Little, D-Albuquerque, a sponsor of the 2024 bill, defended the AI content law in a statement published by The Santa Fe New Mexican last Thursday.
“Our state’s Campaign Reporting Act simply requires a disclosure noting when A.I. was used in the creation of campaign materials; it does not ban the use of the technology,” Little said.
“New Mexico voters deserve to know whether ads targeting them contain real images or fake ones that could falsely depict a candidate doing almost anything.”
State Sen. Katy Duhigg, D-Albuquerque, another sponsor of the bill, echoed Little’s defense of the law, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican.
The Bee has previously filed successful litigation against similar laws in California and Hawaii. One proponent of Hawaii’s law was Danny de Gracia, a political scientist and ordained minister who penned a column last year arguing that the state law “gives responsible citizens a guardrail against our system of government being undermined by lies.”
“Satire and parody are certainly legitimate forms of free expression, but when we get into the realm of making photo-realistic or life-like representations of individuals, the context of how they are used can change everything,” wrote de Gracia at the time.
“[I]t’s time to stop suggesting that the First Amendment gives us the power to obliterate truth and peddle intrigue. It does not. The founders wanted an enlightened citizenry, not an impassioned mob.”
De Gracia argued that the Bee “won’t be seriously inconvenienced by having to use labels on fake images or simulated videos produced by AI” and that this “should be something any responsible comedian or publication would want.”
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