Senate Education Committee discusses bond elections, AI deepfakes

The Senate K-16 Education met April 8 to discuss a variety of bills, two of which were of particular interest.

Bond transparency

SB 843 by Sen. Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham) would create a publicly-available statewide database of local bond elections. While most bonds are approved by voters, many say they do not know all the details of proposed bonds before they vote. Instead, they end up supporting the measures because they want to support their local public schools. 

The database would require school districts to report the exact language of a proposed bond measure, the interest rate on the bond, the result of the election, the list of projects to be funded by the bond,  and an accurate accounting of how bond money has been spent. 

Kolkhorst described her bill as transformative for bond election transparency, stating that Texas has the highest bond debt in the nation by a significant margin, possibly attributable to a lack of information during election season regarding bond projects. Sen. Royce West (D-Dallas) suggested including charter operators in the bill, and Kolkhorst said that would be a reasonable addition.

AI deepfakes

SB 747 by Sen. Phil King (R-Weatherford) attempts to address the rapidly growing issue of deepfake images and videos online. "Deepfake" is a term used for AI-generated images and video that the creator attempts to pass off as real. With significant advances in artificial intelligence tools in the past few years, policymakers have attempted to stay ahead of the issue primarily in two arenas: political campaigns and sexual imagery. 

In politics, much of how voters assess candidates is by their voting record and their public statements. Sufficiently convincing deepfakes could pass for genuine video footage of candidates saying compromising things and ruin campaigns. 

In schools, there have been recent incidents of students creating sexually explicit images of other students using AI. Some students have even attempted to blackmail other students by threatening to release sexually explicit deepfake images to the school community. However, students have not been the only victims of deepfakes: teachers have also been the subject of deepfakes created by students. But SB 747 only addresses students as victims.

King's bill would require the Texas School Safety Center to develop a program to address the issue. Districts and charters would be required to include creation of sexually explicit deepfakes in their cyberbullying policies.

Eliston Berry, a Texas high school student, testified in support of the bill. Last year, she was the victim of sexually explicit deepfake images and it took significant effort to have the images removed. US. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) stepped in to help have them removed and authored a bipartisan bill to address the issue at the federal level.