Several pieces of AI-generated content were used to express support or fanfare for certain candidates. For example, an AI-generated video of Donald Trump and Elon Musk dancing to the BeeGees song “Stayin' Alive”. Shared millions of times on social mediaWhich also includes Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee.
“It's all about social signaling. These are all the reasons why people share these things. This is not AI. You're seeing the effects of polarized voters,'' says Bruce Schneier, a public interest technologist and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. “It's not like we've had the right choices throughout our history and now suddenly AI comes along and it's all misinformation.”
But don't get it twisted – there Were Misleading deepfakes spread during this election. For example, in the days before the Bangladesh elections, Deepfakes enthusiastically circulate online Supporters of a political party in the country 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 cases of deepfakes this year.
“In a number of election contexts,” he says, “there have been examples of genuinely misleading or confusing uses of synthetic media in audio, video and image formats that have puzzled journalists or made it difficult for them to fully verify.” Or challenging.” He says this shows that the tools and systems currently in place to detect AI-generated media still lag behind the pace at which the technology is developing. In locations outside Western Europe, this address mounting equipment are even less reliable,
Gregory says, “Fortunately, AI was not used on a large scale in most elections or in misleading ways in decisive ways, but it is very clear that there is a need for identification tools and those who need it most.” There's a gap in access.” “This is no time for complacency.”
He says that the existence of synthetic media means that politicians have been able to allege that real media is fake – a phenomenon known as the “liar's dividend”. in AugustDonald Trump alleged that photos showing large crowds of people at Vice President Kamala Harris's rallies were AI-generated. (They weren't.) Gregory says that in Witness's deepfake rapid-response force's analysis of all reports, about a third of the cases involved politicians using AI to deny evidence of a real event — many of which were leaked. Were related to the conversation.