The AI ​​election year was not what everyone expected

Many pieces of AI-generated content have been used to express support or fandom of certain candidates. For example, an AI-generated video of Donald Trump and Elon Musk dancing to the BeeGees song “Stayin’ Alive” was shared millions of times on social mediaincluding Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah.

“It’s all about social signaling. It’s all the reasons why people are sharing this stuff. It’s not AI. You’re seeing the effects of a polarized electorate,” says Bruce Schneier, a public interest technologist and professor at Harvard Kennedy School. “It’s not like we’ve had perfect elections throughout our history and now all of a sudden there’s AI and it’s all misinformation.”

But do not twist – here they were deceptive deepfakes spreading during this election. For example, in the days before the Bangladeshi elections, deepfakes circulate online encourage supporters of one of the country’s political parties to boycott the vote. Sam Gregory, program director of the nonprofit Witness, which helps people use technology to support human rights and runs a rapid response detection program for civil society organizations and journalists, says his team has seen an increase in cases of deep fakes this year.

“In many electoral contexts,” he says, “there have been examples of misleading or confusing real use of synthetic media in audio, video and image formats that have puzzled journalists or have not been possible for them to fully verify or challenge.” What this reveals, he says, is that the tools and systems currently in place to detect AI-generated media are still lagging behind the pace at which the technology is developing. In places outside the United States and Western Europe, these detection tools they are even less reliable.

“Fortunately, AI in deceptive ways has not been used at scale in most elections or in pivotal ways, but it is very clear that there is a gap in the detection tools and access to them for the people who need it most,” says Gregory. “This is not the time for complacency.”

The very existence of synthetic media at all, he says, has meant that politicians have been able to claim that the real media is fake – a phenomenon known as the “liar’s dividend”. In AugustDonald Trump has claimed that images showing large crowds of people going to rallies for Vice President Kamala Harris were generated by AI. (They weren’t.) Gregory says that in an analysis of all reports to Witness’ rapid response force, about a third of the cases were politicians using AI to deny evidence of a real event – many involving conversations filtered.