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Brace Yourself for the 2024 Deepfake Election:
Artificial intelligence was once something the average person described in the abstract. They had no tactile relationship with it that they were aware of, even if their devices were often utilizing it. That's all changed over the past year as people have started to engage with AI programs like OpenAI's DALL-E and ChatGPT, and the technology is rapidly advancing.
As AI is democratized, democracy itself is falling under new pressures. There will likely be many exciting ways it will be deployed, but it may also start to distort reality and could become a major threat to the 2024 presidential election if AI-generated audio, images, and videos of candidates proliferate. The line between what's real and what's fake could start to blur significantly more than it already has in an age of rampant disinformation.
"We've seen pretty dramatic shifts in the landscape when it comes to generative tools—particularly in the last year," says Henry Ajder, an independent AI expert. "I think the scale of content we're now seeing being produced is directly related to that dramatic opening up of accessibility."
It's not a question of whether AI-generated content is going to start playing a role in politics, because it's already happening. AI-generated images and videos featuring president Joe Biden and Donald Trump have started spreading around the internet. Republicans recently used AI to generate an attack ad against Biden. The question is, what will happen when anyone can open their laptop and, with minimal effort, quickly create a convincing deepfake of a politician?
There are plenty of ways to generate AI images from text, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. It's easy to generate a clone of someone's voice with an AI program like the one offered by ElevenLabs. Convincing deepfake videos are still difficult to produce, but Ajder says that might not be the case within a year or so.
"To create a really high-quality deepfake still requires a fair degree of expertise, as well as post-production expertise to touch up the output the AI generates," Ajder says. "Video is really the next frontier in generative AI."
Some deepfakes of political figures have emerged in recent years, such as one of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling his troops to surrender that was released last year. Once the technology has advanced more, which may not take long considering how quickly other forms of generative AI are advancing, more of these types of videos may appear as they become more convincing and easier to produce.
"I don't think there's a website where you can say, 'Create me a video of Joe Biden saying X.' That doesn't exist, but it will," says Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information. "It's just a matter of time. People are already working on text-to-video."
That includes companies like Runway, Google, and Meta. Once one company releases a high-quality version of a text-to-video generative AI tool, we may see many others quickly release their own versions, as we did after ChatGPT was released. Farid says that nobody wants to get "left behind," so these companies tend to just release what they have as soon as they can.
"It consistently amazes me that in the physical world, when we release products there are really stringent guidelines," Farid says. "You can't release a product and hope it doesn't kill your customer. But with software, we're like, 'This doesn't really work, but let's see what happens when we release it to billions of people.'"
If we start to see a significant number of deepfakes spreading during the election, it's easy to imagine someone like Donald Trump sharing this kind of content on social media and claiming it's real. A deepfake of President Biden saying something disqualifying could come out shortly before the election, and many people might never find out it was AI-generated. Research has consistently shown, after all, that fake news spreads further than real news.
Even if deepfakes don't become ubiquitous before the 2024 election, which is still 18 months away, the mere fact that this kind of content can be created could affect the election. Knowing that fraudulent images, audio, and video can be created relatively easily could make people distrust the legitimate material they come across.
"In some respects, deepfakes and generative AI don't even need to be involved in the election for them to still cause disruption, because now the well has been poisoned with this idea that anything could be fake," says Ajder. "That provides a really useful excuse if something inconvenient comes out featuring you. You can dismiss it as fake."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28 2023, @08:48PM (8 children)
yeah... it's totally the left damaging democracy and not the party booting elected officials, rioting over losing a presidential election, made-up bullshit to reduce mail-in voting, stacking judges judges to remove medical freedoms, banning books in school, tackling inflation by checking out hunter's dick pics, etc.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29 2023, @12:13AM (7 children)
Which side was in favor of unprovoked violence?
"Punch a Nazi" ring any bells?
And just because you call someone a Nazi neither makes it true nor makes it ok to punch them,
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday April 29 2023, @12:27AM
Which side wanted to legalize running over protestors?
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday April 29 2023, @04:11AM (2 children)
Your kind never did like your own tactics being used against them....karma's a bitch, ain't she?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29 2023, @11:41PM (1 child)
It will be, once you wake up the sleeping dragon.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday May 01 2023, @03:36PM
Stop stealing my lines. The "sleeping dragon" isn't your merry little band of beer-bellied cousin-fucking wannabe Hitlerjugend. It's all the normal, sane, decent people in the country.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday April 29 2023, @03:19PM (2 children)
You specifically said "unprovoked" violence.
Nazis advocate for genocide, very much a lethal threat to their chosen targets. Nazis have formed organizations that regularly engage in the beating of their targets and vandalism of their property. Nazis have repeatedly encouraged murder sprees on their chosen targets, whether we're talking LGBTQIA+ bars and clubs, synagogues, churches, or grocery stores with lots of black people shopping. Nazis were directly involved in attacking the US Capitol building with the stated intent of murdering members of Congress and the Vice-President of the United States. And police have been pretty consistently minimal help to protect against this threat - as an example, at Charlottesville, a Nazi fired a gun towards a crowd right in front of a bunch of cops, and the police didn't even pull that guy aside to ask a few questions.
That sure sounds like provocation to me.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2023, @01:36AM (1 child)
You forgot to say wearing a red cap is an automatic conviction for all of the crimes you listed and thereby makes it ok to punch you.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday May 01 2023, @03:39PM
As stated elsewhere, tolerance is a peace treaty, not a suicide pact. While I wouldn't hit you unless you hit me first, I also have no compunction about mocking you mercilessly :) And something tells me you would rather be hit than mocked, somehow. Well, too bad, asshat :D
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...