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.
“These AI assessors are notoriously inaccurate,” said Jonathan Underland, Becerra’s spokesman.
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 easy when you’re a candidate to make all sorts of promises. It’s harder to prove you can deliver,” he said at a stop in Glendale on Monday. “Vote for someone who knows how to deliver, because the promises go away after Election Day.”
Introducing Becerra to the crowd, Assemblyman John Harabedian offered a similar line: “He is someone who will underpromise and overdeliver.”
Assuming he is elected, Becerra will face immediate calls to expand the state’s incentive for film and TV production, now capped at $750 million a year. 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.
“We do need to, early next year, take steps to strengthen it,” said Rick Chavez Zbur, the Burbank Assemblyman who is one of Hollywood’s best allies in Sacramento. “A number of us have wanted to uncap the program for some time.”
Another proposal is to include “above the line” salaries — actors, directors, etc. — in the program. 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.
“I will support anything that will help us keep Hollywood in Hollywood,” he said. “We have to fight for this industry.”
Asked whether he supports eliminating the $750 million cap or including “above the line” costs, he was noncommittal.
“I’ll sit down with all the legislators to see what kind of proposals are put before us,” he said. “But we’re going to fight.”
Becerra’s Republican opponent, Steve Hilton, has vowed to eliminate the cap and to include above-the-line costs. 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.)
Xavier Becerra’s film platform, as analyzed by Pangram
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 don’t do that,” he said. “We don’t talk to AI about policy. 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.
Last month, the Economist used Pangram to analyze parliamentary speeches, finding that 10% of the words spoken in the British Parliament were drafted with AI. AI use was also prevalent in Australia, Canada and the U.S. When the speakers were asked about it, the most common response was “surprise and denial,” the publication reported.
The Hilton campaign has used AI to create campaign ads, and has disclosed that usage in accordance with state law. In one such ad, an AI-generated Becerra endorses the idea of sending out a “vague policy tweet” — “Great idea, but keep it vague like all the other ones. Not too much detail.”
Becerra’s campaign has said it does not use AI in its videos, and has criticized Hilton’s “AI slop.” The state AI disclosure requirement covers audio, video and images, but does not extend to text.
At the campaign event, Becerra denied that his policy statement was AI-generated.
“No,” he said, “that’s absolutely incorrect.”
