AI’s Election Year Didn’t Turn Out Like Everyone Expected

A lot of AI-generated content has been used to express support or fandom for certain candidates. For example, there was an AI-generated video of Donald Trump and Elon Musk dancing to “Stayin’ Alive” by the BeeGees. it was shared millions of times on social networksIncluding Republican Senator Mike Lee from Utah.

“It’s all about social signaling. These are all the reasons why people share this stuff. This is not AI. You see the effects of a polarized electorate,” says Bruce Schneier, a public interest technologist and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. “We haven’t had perfect elections in our history, and now all of a sudden there’s artificial intelligence and it’s all disinformation.”

But don’t get it twisted – there was the deceptive depth frauds spread during this election. For example, a few days before the elections in Bangladesh Deepfakes proliferated online supporters of one of the country’s political parties will boycott the vote. Sam Gregory, program director at Witness, a nonprofit that 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 deep-pocketed fraud this year.

“In many election contexts,” he says, “there have been examples of both real misleading and confusing use of synthetic media in audio, video, and image formats that have confused journalists or been impossible for them to fully investigate or challenge.” This is because the tools and systems currently available to detect AI-generated media still lag behind the pace of technology development outside of the US and Western Europe they are less reliable.

“Fortunately, deceptive AI has not been used on a large scale or in a major way in most elections, 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 said. “This is no time to be complacent.”

In general, he said, the availability of synthetic media meant that politicians were able to pretend that real media was fake – a phenomenon known as the “liar’s dividend”. In AugustDonald Trump has claimed that footage showing large crowds attending rallies for Vice President Kamala Harris was created by artificial intelligence. (They weren’t.) Gregory says that in Witness’s analysis of all reports to its deep-fake rapid-response force, about a third of the cases involved politicians using AI to deny evidence of a real event — many involving leaked conversations.