On his campaign website, Xavier Becerra has a page devoted to Hollywood. The 1,600-word policy statement is long on platitudes — “California Is the Home of Film and TV and We Intend to Keep It That Way” — but short on concrete promises. It may also have been written with artificial intelligence.
According to Pangram, a widely used AI detector, “100% of this text is AI,” though the campaign denies it. Becerra is cruising toward the California gubernatorial election with a 20-point lead in the polls and a 96% chance of victory in the prediction markets. He has denied most requests for interviews and has avoided making firm commitments on a range of issues from AI to housing to electric vehicles.
On the campaign trail, he has turned his lack of promises into part of his pitch. It’s harder to prove you can deliver,” he said at a stop in Glendale on Monday. Even if Congress passes a federal film incentive, state lawmakers argue that California must do more to compete for film jobs.
Attorney General Rob Bonta has said he will sponsor a bill to eliminate the cap entirely. Such ideas would cost money — maybe a lot of money — and would have to be reconciled with the state’s other fiscal priorities. How would Becerra do that?
At the event on Monday, the candidate was not much more definitive than his website. According to Pangram, Hilton’s film policy was also written by AI, though because it is shorter and mostly made up of bulleted lists, rather than complete sentences, it is harder for Pangram to analyze. (The Hilton campaign declined to comment.) Becerra’s film platform includes some of the tells of AI writing, such as the “it’s not this, it’s that” construction: “California did not just produce the film industry. It built it.” Ironically, it also endorses a state mandate for AI disclosure by productions.
Underland said that AI was not used to brainstorm or develop the platform in any way. We talk to people about policy.” Pangram claims a false positive rate of 1 in 10,000, and claims the tool is especially accurate when reviewing political speeches, with human writing flagged as AI 0.0% of the time. Independent research has also backed up Pangram’s accuracy.
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