With elections in America, the UK, India, and more, this is a huge year for global politics. While bots were a cause for concern as far back as the 2016 election, technology has come a long way since then. With the rise of Generative AI, the world’s elections face an existential threat from deepfakes, disinformation and misinformation. To meet this threat, Nayef Al-Rodhan argues that we cannot rewire our brains to be able to spot misinformation. Therefore, the impetus relies on regulation and societal education.
Will artificial intelligence-generated deepfakes provide a “perfect storm” for malicious actors looking to hijack forthcoming local and general elections, as the British Home Secretary James Cleverly warned recently? Sophisticated deepfakes are becoming a global problem, and an urgent one at that. As an estimated 2 billion people head to the polls this year, there has hardly been a worse time to allow harmful content to flourish online.
The toxic mixture of increasingly sophisticated AI tools and flimsy prevention measures means that we could soon be faced with a situation where a viral deepfake dismantles democratic and governance processes. Policy and tech circles are starting, slowly, to wake up to the problem. This month, European political parties signed a voluntary code of conduct aimed at preventing the creation and dissemination of unlabeled deepfakes ahead of the European elections in June. Earlier this year, Silicon Valley bosses pledged to prevent AI-generated content from interfering with global elections this year. At this year’s Munich Security Conference, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok and OpenAI were among 20 tech companies which agreed to work together to combat the creation and spread of deepfake images, videos and audio designed to mislead voters.
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