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posted by janrinok on Friday April 28 2023, @07:23PM   Printer-friendly

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 RunwayGoogle, 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."


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by HiThere on Friday April 28 2023, @08:50PM (6 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 28 2023, @08:50PM (#1303763) Journal

    Sorry, but democracy *is* failing. The partisan sides have gotten more extreme, and don't listen to each other. Pointing to individual cases where one side was right and the other was wrong doesn't address the actual failing. And it's not happenstance. The social media sites intentionally designed their interactions to foment strife, because it caused greater engagement, which brought in more money from the advertisers.

    Now what to do about this is a separate question, but this is the kind of thing that tore apart the Eastern Roman Empire. (I.e., it's not a failure of democracy, it's a failure of human nature.)

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Friday April 28 2023, @09:03PM (5 children)

    by TheGratefulNet (659) on Friday April 28 2023, @09:03PM (#1303767)

    capitalism is ruining democracy. its more powerful and its controlled by a smaller elite group.

    the fox tv network kingdom is an example. rupert is hell bent on destroying what is good about the west, for some damned reason. maybe its the joker concept: he just wants to watch the world burn, cause he can afford it (?)

    at any rate, the powerful have decided the world is their plaything and as long as they dont have to deal with fallout, anything goes.

    I have another 20 or 30 years left in me, but for those that are starting out in this world, I pity you and what a horrible future you may have.

    I do think we have seen mankind's best. we've peaked and are now on the down side, world-wide. real shame but this is what mankind is, at its core.

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    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28 2023, @10:37PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28 2023, @10:37PM (#1303786)

      There's a description in one of Bob Wilson's book about why.
      He describes the two views of the future as rising and falling expectations.
      Rich people promote the view of falling expectations because (paraphrasing because I don't have it to hand) "every time someone asked why things weren't getting better despite technology, unfriendly eyes would turn to the small group of rich old primates who owned and controlled almost everything"

      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday April 29 2023, @12:19AM (1 child)

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday April 29 2023, @12:19AM (#1303799) Journal

        That was in part of the Schrodinger's Cat collection.

        He's got a lot of good points, but don't take him as gospel. The solutions he proposes wouldn't work either. But he does see the problems.

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        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2023, @01:39AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2023, @01:39AM (#1303978)

          I live my life according to Tenets of the Church of Bob.
          There are no fnords in the advertisements.

      • (Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Sunday April 30 2023, @03:47AM (1 child)

        by TheGratefulNet (659) on Sunday April 30 2023, @03:47AM (#1304001)

        yet another reason to be depressed: in the US, we have a political group that has completely given up trying to govern (at least based on what people really want) - and they are grandstanding and hoping to 'win' on social media. this passes for elected officials. they want to do all they can to make the other party look bad, even to the point of shitting in your own backyard.

        so we can look forward to 2 years, roughly, of this kind of crap and total waste of time, lack of progress and strong attempts at regress.

        zero care for making the world (or the country) actually better in any way. they only want to appeal to their fan base, and they are almost entirely religiously based (beyond ration) and they want to force their narrow extreme religion on everyone.

        THIS is what we have for the next 2 years. and if things go horribly wrong, maybe another 4 years after that.

        things look quite bad for the US, in the short term. prove me wrong. please. I beg you.

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        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2023, @04:01AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2023, @04:01AM (#1304007)

          You know, from outside the USA, I really don't know which political group you are referring to.