AI’s election year wasn’t quite what everyone expected

Many pieces of AI-generated content were used to express support or admiration for particular candidates. For example, an AI-generated video of Donald Trump and Elon Musk dancing to the BeeGes song “Stayin’ Alive.” It has been shared millions of times on social mediaincluding Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah.

“It’s all about social signals. It’s all the reasons people share these things. It’s not AI. You’re seeing voter polarization effects,” says Bruce Schneier, a public interest technology expert and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “We’ve had perfect elections all of our history, and now all of a sudden there’s artificial intelligence and it’s all disinformation.”

But don’t get it twisted – there it is He was The misleading deepfakes that have spread during this election. For example, in the days leading up to the elections in Bangladesh, Deepfakes have been circulating online at an encouraging rate Supporters of one of the country’s political parties to boycott the vote. Sam Gregory, program director for 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 deepfakes this year.

He says: “In multiple electoral contexts, there were examples of deceptive or confusing real use of synthetic media in audio, video and image formats that baffled journalists or were not possible for them to fully verify or dispute. What this reveals, he says, is that the tools and systems currently in place to detect AI-generated media still lag behind the pace of technology development. In places outside the US and Western Europe, these detection tools are being used It is even less reliable.

“Fortunately, AI has not been used in widespread deceptive ways in most elections or in pivotal ways, but it is very clear that there is a gap in detection tools and access to them for the people who need them most,” Gregory says. “This is no time for complacency.”

He says the mere existence of synthetic media means that politicians have been able to claim that real media is fake – a phenomenon known as “liar profits”. In AugustDonald Trump has claimed that images showing large crowds of people heading to rallies for Vice President Kamala Harris were created by artificial intelligence. (They weren’t.) Gregory says that in an analysis of all reports submitted to Witness’ deepfake rapid response force, about a third of the cases involved politicians using AI to deny evidence of a real event — many of which involved leaked conversations.