Alexander Kolodin, a Republican in Arizona’s state legislature, said he relied on the generative AI tool to help him define the term ‘deepfake’, which generally refers to highly-convincing fake images and videos of a person.

Because he is “by no means a computer scientist”, Kolodin said he “thought to myself, well, let me just ask the subject matter expert”, The Guardian reports.

His bill is now law, having been passed unanimously by both chambers of the legislature and signed by the state’s Democratic governor earlier this week.

Under the law, election candidates and voters can ask a judge to declare whether an alleged deepfake is real or not.

“Now at least their campaign has as a declaration from a court saying, this doesn’t look like it’s you, and they could use that for counter-narrative messaging,” Kolodin said.

In some circumstances, the law also allows for a judge to order a deepfake’s removal.