AI’s Election Year Wasn’t What Everyone Was Expecting

Most of the AI-generated content was used to show support or to entertain other people. For example, an AI-generated video of Donald Trump and Elon Musk dancing to the BeeGees’ “Stayin’ Alive” was. shared millions of times on social networksincluding Senator Mike Lee, Utah Republican.

“All this is about people’s signatures. They are all reasons why people share these things. It’s not AI. You’re seeing the results of a biased electorate,” says Bruce Schneier, an economist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. “It’s not like we had good decisions in our history and now all of a sudden there’s AI and it’s all fake.”

But don’t get confused – there he was the deep delusions that pervaded this election. For example, a few days before the Bangladesh election, deepfakes are circulated on the internet promoting supporters of one political party in the country to boycott the vote. Sam Gregory, program manager for the non-profit organization Mboni, which helps people use technology in support of human rights and oversees the identification of people who respond quickly to civil society and the media, said that his group has seen an increase in crimes in the past year. this.

He said: “In several elections, there have been examples of fraudulent or misleading use of media materials, videos, and images that have confused the media or been impossible to confirm or refute. ” What is revealing, 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. For locations outside the US and Western Europe, these detection devices they are very reliable.

“Fortunately, AI in fraud has not been used on a large scale in many elections or in very important ways, but it is clear that there is a gap in the tools to detect and get it to the people who need it most,” says Gregory. “This is not the time to be happy.”

The existence of artificial media, he says, has meant that politicians can label real and fake news—something known as the “liar’s verdict.” In AugustDonald Trump has claimed that images showing large crowds of people attending Vice President Kamala Harris’ rallies were created by AI. (They weren’t.) Gregory says that in an analysis of all the reports about the Witness’s ability to quickly respond to deep falsehoods, about a third of the cases were politicians who used AI to deny evidence of a real event—many involving leaked conversations.