“The clock is ticking before the next election,” Chaney said. “While truth in political advertising can be legislated this year based on the minimalist South Australian model, AI presents unique, new challenges.

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“Australia has already been too slow to respond to the emergence of AI-generated content in relation to elections. We must move quickly to learn from what’s happening in other countries and put protections in place as soon as possible.

“AI presents a huge threat to democracies across the world, with deepfakes undermining our ability to believe what we see, and sophisticated algorithms polarising our political views in the pursuit of advertising revenue.”

Greens senator David Shoebridge on Monday said “urgent regulatory action” was needed to tackle the issue, given it’s currently not unlawful to produce deepfakes for use in Australian elections.

Labor senator Tony Sheldon, who is chairing the committee, said he was alive to the issue and that generative AI had been used to spread disinformation and deepfakes in recent elections around the world, including in the US primaries.

“We heard from the AEC that no jurisdiction in the world has yet figured out how to effectively restrict the spread of AI-generated disinformation and deepfakes in elections,” he said.

“Big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Uber have a long track record of lawlessness and unethical behaviour. We should be very sceptical about trusting them to now do the right thing when it comes to AI.”

Australian Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers on Monday said the AEC “does not possess the legislative tools or internal technical capability to deter, detect or then adequately deal with AI-generated content”.

He said that if deepfakes were authorised and of a political nature like other election material then they were legal under current legislation.

The commissioner stopped short of calling for new laws, however, instead suggesting codes of conduct could be effective.

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“We think that the outcome [of maintaining electoral integrity] can be achieved through discussions on some of the current political initiatives applied to Australia, such as a national digital literacy campaign, additional legislation voluntary and mandatory codes of practice for technology companies, mandatory watermarking or credentialling of AI-generated electoral content, and voluntary codes of conduct to candidates and political parties to effectively be lawful during election campaigns.”

The government is also facing scrutiny for what technology groups including the Australian Information Industry Association have called a negligible amount of funding for AI capabilities in this month’s budget: $39.9 million over five years.

Independent progressive think tank Per Capita on Tuesday called for a new “public AI commissioner” to combat an overreliance on foreign-owned AI companies. Currently, US-based tech giants including OpenAI, Google and Nvidia are powering much of Australia’s AI usage.

“We are in danger of repeating the mistakes we’ve made with social media with AI,” Per Capita director of responsible technology Jordan Guiao said.

“By allowing foreign-owned private companies to infiltrate our public services, community consultations and our news media, we’ve ceded control to these giant tech companies. It is essential that Australia has solid plans for our own AI sovereignty.”

Pocock said the federal government’s current approach – an interim AI advisory panel – was insufficient for grappling with the challenges presented by AI.

“I don’t think an interim expert advisory panel through to the end of June this year is sufficient,” Pocock said.

“We need an ongoing, expert, centralised government presence to deal with the development and rollout of artificial intelligence, whether that is in the form of a permanent expert committee or a commissioner as some have proposed.”

The Senate committee will report back to the parliament with its recommendations by September.

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