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There’s a growing and widespread consensus that artificial intelligence technology needs legal guardrails, and political ads and communications are one of the prime places lawmakers are looking to place them.

As Kathy Wai of the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office put it in recent legislative testimony: “Campaigns can easily create high-quality, convincing AI generated content in the form of images, voices, deepfakes and other forms. AI is an evolving threat in our highly charged mis-, dis- and mal-information environment.”

Effective solutions, though, will not come easily. Getting the details right, and finding aggressive solutions, can be tricky, and it will take a persistent, ongoing effort.

In Oregon, Senate Bill 1571 would require disclosure of the use of AI to create a false impression In campaigns in ads or other materials. It has backing from legislators in both parties and across the philosophical spectrum.

The bill would carry teeth: Campaigns caught using AI and not disclosing it could face a fine up to $10,000 for each violation. It would exempt news media and some satirical publications from the requirements, and would allow the Secretary of State to draft rules to put enforcement into effect.

But even if campaigns disclose the use of AI in any campaign material, any ad, flyer or other message still could easily lead to false impressions — usually about the subject of an attack. And with AI technology becoming so commonplace nationally, it’s likely to start showing up in small and local political activities before long.

Oregon isn’t the first state to consider regulating the use of AI in campaigns. Half of all the states considered AI-related legislation in last year’s session, and they’ve adopted varying approaches.

The Oregon bill defines a false impression as, “A fundamentally different understanding or impression than a reasonable person would have from the unaltered, original version of the image, audio recording or video recording.” That still might afford significant wiggle room in specific cases if one got to court.

There’s also a reasonable question in most of these efforts about how effective those rules would be. The required disclosure in the Oregon bill, for example, might translate into a small-print notice that would be ignored by viewers or readers emotionally swept away by powerful images.

Oregon law already has long-standing limits on speech in areas such as libel, fraud in some cases, soliciting, perjury and conspiracy.

AI is evolving so fast that it has become hard to define. That doesn’t mean Oregon legislators should wait to address it, but it means they ought to set up an ongoing review — probably a persistent interim committee — to monitor its evolution and track the ways laws might usefully address it.

In arguing for the current Oregon bill, Woods, the sponsor, said “The bill will build awareness.”

That it may do, whether it passes or even if it doesn’t, since more voters may be locally alerted to some of the new ways some candidates or causes may try to deceive them. And that would be a significant plus all by itself, whatever the legal challenge emerging down the road.