Disinformation on Steroids approaching US Elections 2024

Already this year, a robocall generated using artificial intelligence targeted New Hampshire voters in the January primary, in what officials said could be the first attempt at using AI to interfere with a US election.

The deepfake calls were linked to two Texas companies, Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom.

It’s not clear if the deepfake calls actually prevented voters from turning out, but that doesn’t really matter, said Lisa Gilbert, executive vice-president of Public Citizen, a group that’s been pushing for federal and state regulation of AI’s use in politics.

I don’t think we need to wait to see how many people got deceived to understand that that was the point. Examples of what could be ahead for the USA are happening all over the world.

In Slovakia, fake audio recordings may have swayed an election in what serves as a frightening harbinger of the sort of interference the USA will likely experience during the 2024 presidential election, CNN reported.

In Indonesia, an AI-generated avatar of a military commander helped rebrand the country’s defense minister as a chubby-cheeked man who makes Korean-style finger hearts and cradles his beloved cat, Bobby, to the delight of Gen Z voters, Reuters reported.

In India, AI versions of dead politicians have been brought back to compliment elected officials, according to Al Jazeera. But US regulations aren’t ready for the boom in fast-paced AI technology and how it could influence voters.

Soon after the fake call in New Hampshire, the Federal Communications Commission announced a ban on robocalls that use AI audio.

The FEC has yet to put rules in place to govern the use of AI in political ads, though states are moving quickly to fill the gap in regulation.

The US House launched a bipartisan task-force on 20 February that will research ways AI could be regulated and issue a report with recommendations.

But with partisan gridlock ruling Congress, and US regulation trailing the pace of AI’s rapid advance, it’s unclear what, if anything, could be in place in time for this year’s elections.

Without clear safeguards, the impact of AI on the election might come down to what voters can discern as real and not real.

AI – in the form of text, bots, audio, photo or video – can be used to make it look like candidates are saying or doing things they didn’t do, either to damage their reputations or mislead voters.

It can be used to beef up disinformation campaigns, making imagery that looks real enough to create confusion for voters.

Audio content, in particular, can be even more manipulative because the technology for video isn’t as advanced yet and recipients of AI-generated calls lose some of the contextual clues that something is fake that they might find in a deepfake video.

Experts also fear that AI-generated calls will mimic the voices of people a caller knows in real life, which has the potential for a bigger influence on the recipient because the caller would seem like someone they know and trust.

Commonly called the grandparent scam, callers can now use AI to clone a loved one’s voice to trick the target into sending money. That could theoretically be applied to politics and elections.

It could come from your family member or your neighbor and it would sound exactly like them. The ability to deceive from AI has put the problem of mis- and disinformation on steroids.

Perhaps most concerning, though, is that the advent of AI can make people question whether anything they are seeing is real or not, introducing a heavy dose of doubt at a time when the technologies themselves are still learning how to best mimic reality.

There’s a difference between what AI might do and what AI is actually doing, said Katie Harbath, who formerly worked in policy at Facebook and now writes about the intersection between technology and democracy.

People will start to wonder, she said, what if AI could do all this? Then maybe I shouldn’t be trusting everything that I’m seeing.

In the absence of regulations from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), a handful of states have instituted laws over the use of AI in political ads, and dozens more states have filed bills on the subject.

At the state level, regulating AI in elections is a bipartisan issue. The bills often call for clear disclosures or disclaimers in political ads that make sure voters understand content was AI-generated; without such disclosure, the use of AI is then banned in many of the bills.

The FEC opened a rule-making process for AI last summer, and the agency said it expects to resolve it sometime this summer, the Washington Post has reported.

Until then, political ads with AI may have some state regulations to follow, but otherwise aren’t restricted by any AI-specific FEC rules.

Hopefully we will be able to get something in place in time, so it’s not kind of a wild west. But it’s closing in on that point, and we need to move really fast.

The Guardian / ABC Flash Point News 2024.