A fake picture of Donald Trump's arrest was shown on tuesday. A dissonance of a dark future in the event of Joe Biden'sBiden's re-election. An audio Deepfake of the two men slinging insults. In the future, fast-evolving AI technology could turbocharge misinformation in US political campaigns, experts said.
The 2024 presidential election is expected to be the first election in the United States that sees the widespread adoption of advanced tools powered by AI that have blurred the boundaries between fiction and fact.
Techlogists also warn that bad actors exploiting AI to sow chaos at a time when the political climate is already hyperpolarised in the US and many voters dispute verified facts such as that Trump lost the election.
In a sobering bellwether of what may become widespread ahead of the 2024 race, fake images of Trump being hauled away by New York police officers - created by an AI art generator - went viral in March.
The Republican National Committee released a video made of AI-produced images of a dystopian future in response to Biden's announcement that he would run for reelection in 2024.
It depicted photo-realistic images of panic on Wall Street, China invading Taiwan, immigrants overrunning border agents, and a military takeover of San Francisco amid severe crime.
And earlier this year, a lifelike but utterly fake AI audio of Biden and Trump - expected to square off next year in a rematch of the 2020 election - made the rounds on TikTok.
The impact of AI will reflect the values of those using it - bad actors in particular have new tools to supercharge their efforts to fuel hate and suspicion, or to falsify images, sound, or video in an effort to bamboozle the press and the public, said Joe Rospars, the founder of left-wing political consultancy Blue State.
To combat these efforts, Rospars said, it will require vigilance by the media and tech companies and from voters themselves, Rospars said.
The efficiency of AI is clear, no matter what a user's intent is.
Dan Woods, the former chief technology officer for Biden's 2020 campaign, said the current level of AI lies a lot.
If our foreign adversaries need to convince an already hallucinating robot to spread misinformation, well then we should be prepared for a much larger misinformation campaign than we saw in 2016 alone. Vance Reavie, the chief executive of Junction AI, said AI advancements will become a game-changing tool for understanding voters.
There is a large percentage of the population who don't vote at all or vote irregularly, Reavie said.