Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni claiming to earn huge sums of money
with an app created by Elon Musk.
Trump posing with young black voters in the US.
And an Indian politician giving speeches six years after his death.
You guessed it right, all of these are fake and have
been generated with the help of artificial intelligence.
This year, when more than 40% of the world's population
are being called to the polls,
AI generated fake content is shaping up to be one of the biggest threats to democracy.
Those fakes are becoming increasingly convincing.
This information can be created on a massive scale.
AI systems can be used to basically manipulate democracy.
According to the World Economic Forum Risk Survey, disinformation and
misinformation are the most severe global risks this year.
AI generated content, especially deep fake videos and
cloned voices are taking that risk even further.
In this video, we explore how artificial intelligence can influence
elections and what we can do about it.
We'll be focusing on three major elections in India,
the United States and in Europe.
Let's take a closer look at India first.
This is a message by M. Karunanidhi, one of India's most prominent
political figures in its post independence history.
In January 2024, he apparently delivered the speech
praising his son, now the leader of his father's party.
For his work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But there's a twist.
Karunanidhi died in 2018, long before the COVID-19 pandemic.
This video was created with AI software.
You can tell by looking at his sunglasses.
They look unrealistically slick, and there's a tell-tale flicker
on either side.
That's the first clue that the video was manipulated with AI.
What's more, Karunanidhi was unable to speak
when he died at the age of 94.
The video, however, shows a much younger, healthier man
with no speech impairment.
The creator of this particular video walked us through the process.
The question is which age do I want to recreate? he person?
OK, and do I want to alter exactly like the person is?
Or should I make an alteration?
So I can change costumes, we can make them hip, we can change the accents.
These are all possible.
In theory, all are possible.
Karunanidhi's party believes that the late politician is still
able to pull crowds, even after his death.
Karunanidhi's party has used his AI avatar
several times in the past month.
Anyone with a smartphone or computer can clone human voices and produce
realistic looking images, videos and audio in just a few seconds.
These tools are not just in the hands of sort of very
rich nation states anymore, but that everybody can produce
very convincing AI generated content.
You know, at essentially no costs.
AI can construct images of political candidates
appearing to do something totally out of character
or something they never did in real life.
This can damage their public image and mislead voters.
Such manipulation cannot only sway voters opinions,
but also sow seeds of doubt,
making voters feel they can't trust anything they see online.
The problem is this is a multinational phenomenon,
but the nation state is the best one equipped to try to deal with this
and that has not been happening.
To me, it's absurd that these systems
should be released upon the world and even applied to things like elections,
without first and foremost ensuring that there are rules placed there
to ensure that these systems do not abuse democracy.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi can now
deliver his speeches in different languages.
Or so it would seem.
His speeches are being translated and dubbed in eight Indian languages,
all in real time with the help of AI.
But what if there is a mistake in the translation?
What if that mistake effects a politically sensitive issue?
It's dangerous when voters can't be sure whether they are listening
to a real politician or an AI generated version.
The Indian government told online platforms providing AI tools
that their services should not generate anything that threatened the integrity of
the electoral process.
Companies have also been requested to label AI-generated content
with a unique code.
This could help identify sources of misinformation.
I think we should think about innovation not just as
creating a new technology that nobody even really knows how it works
and there's no transparency with it.
Innovation also involves things like thinking about policy,
thinking about protecting democracy, thinking about protecting workers,
thinking about protecting people all around the planet.
That's innovation also.
India is witnessing a month and a half long election marathon.
But it's not the only country heading to the polls.
In June, more than 400 million people are eligible
to vote for members of the European Parliament.
Let's take a closer look, because some deep fakes targeting
European politicians have already been released.
This video circulating online appears to show
French President Emmanuel Macron dancing at a nightclub.
One user wrote online: "...French President Emmanuel Macron before he entered politics
, dancing in gay clubs, wearing woman's clothing, bras, even devil horns.
This is who leads a country!?"
The video is fake.
We reverse searched images from the video
and found the original clips of club goers in the 1980s.
As you can see here, Macron's face was superimposed onto
the heads of various dancers with the help of AI.
At the time, Macron would have been between 3 and 12 years old,
a bit too young for a nightclub.
According to the European Digital Media Observatory,
AI generated content poses a big risk ahead of elections,
especially when it comes to disinformation campaigns.
It can be used to discredit politicians, like in the case of Macron,
or to attack the integrity of the democratic process, like in Slovakia in 2023.
Days before Slovakia's election was set to determine who will lead the country,
an audio recording spread across social media.
It sounded like one of the lead candidates,
Michal Simecka, boasting about how he would rig the election
in favor of his party.
Do you think this does sound like you?
It does sound like me.
But the audio was an AI generated fake.
We uploaded the audio to truemedia.org, an AI detection website.
The result? Highly suspicious.
That's the first hint that something isn't quite right.
You can also spot inconsistencies when you listen to the audio.
What stands out most is how unnatural the voices sound.
They have an unsteady intonation and make unnatural pauses.
Meanwhile, natural pauses, such as when speakers cuff or clear their throat,
are nowhere to be found.
And the background noise seems a little bit too loud.
Simecka lost the election and we can't say for sure
whether or not the fake recording played a role in that.
Some surely thought it was real.
No one really expected audio to be the problem.
Everybody thought it would be images or video.
And then it was an audio file.
And that fell through, you know, all sort of monitoring mechanisms
that were put into place beforehand.
Now experts have warned of a mass spread of a pro-Russian propaganda campaign
ahead of the European elections.
They believe the campaigns could undermine voters' faith
in European democracy.
They tried to justify the invasion of Ukraine
and also they deny massacres committed in the war
or try to attack Ukrainian refugees
and hinder the inclusion in European countries.
And also they attack European politicians such as Scholz, Macron or Zelenskyy.
To put a stop to the potential misuse of AI
and to protect the European elections from disinformation,
the EU has passed the AI Act.
Worldwide, this law is the first of its kind.
In the future, all online providers using AI such as ChatGPT, image editing programs
and even social media must transparently disclose
whenever text, images or videos have been produced with AI.
In other words, AI generated content must be clearly labeled.
The law can be a very good ally in the fight against disinformation
because it will force the identification of AI generated content as such.
And this is a very big step.
The act is expected to come into force in 2026, so a little too late for this year's elections.
But in other parts of the world, policymakers have also begun to realize
that regulating AI is essential.
Especially when decisive elections are coming up,
like in the United States.
In November, the US is going to witness a rematch
between incumbent president Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump.
Already, AI generated fakes are in circulation, manipulating voters.
This robocall was asking voters
to refrain from casting their votes in the New Hampshire primary elections
and save it for the November presidential elections.
The voice sounds like that of President Biden, but it's not.
The robocall was generated with the help of AI.
Not only that, the claims made in the call were also untrue.
U.S. citizens are allowed to cast their votes in both the primaries
and the presidential elections of course.
There is no such thing as "saving" a vote.
The call was meant to prevent people from voting in the primaries.
The White House has confirmed that the call was not authentic.
Unlike AI-generated images and videos,
fake audios usually have very few technical glitches.
If the source material is good,
it's possible to generate fake but realistic sounding audio with sophisticated software.
This could set a dangerous precedent.
In the case of audio in many instances the sound is indistinguishable from a real person,
from the real person being portrayed.
AI-generated voices in robocalls were banned following the incident.
The US regulator, the FCC, or Federal Communications Commission
said that they could deceive voters.
Trump's election campaign could add another layer of deception.
He's already been accused of spreading wrong information on
multiple crucial accounts during his term as president,
most notably leading up to the January 6th insurrection.
He's also labeled mainstream media sources as fake news.
You are fake news.
Fake news.
It's fake, phony, fake. Fake news.
This is just in. We can now call the 2024 presidential race for Joe Biden.
The Republican Party released this attack ad last year.
Claiming to show possible consequences of Joe Biden's reelection,
it depicts war, economic downfall
and an endless line of migrants entering the country.
The dark images were all created with AI.
If you look closely, you can see that Joe Biden's and Kamala Harris' skin
looks too smooth to be true.
Both look more like wax figures than human beings.
That's just one clue that the image is AI generated.
Also, this skyscraper stands out at an odd angle.
Overall, the only thing that would be advanced is some sense of chaos
and the undermining of social trust
if people increasingly think they can't believe
what they see and hear with their own eyes and ears.
But AI can also help us detect deep fakes and other forms of disinformation.
A lot of fact checking organizations and some projects
in the frame of the European Union
are working in using AI to develop better technologies
to fight disinformation, to flag, to monitor, to label, to search.
Take AI detectors for example.
They are designed to recognize certain patterns in text,
videos or images that could indicate that the content is fake.
Some companies like Nuanced are already training their algorithms
to detect AI generated content with the help of, you guessed it, more AI.
But today's AI detectors are not always accurate
and can only be used as a first step in investigations.
Ahead of the many elections around the world this year,
platforms and tech companies such as OpenAI, Tiktok and Meta
signed an accord to combat AI disinformation.
Meta is planning to label all AI content starting this May.
Social media platforms and tech companies are not the only ones
who need to take responsibility, experts say.
The technological solution by itself is not an adequate response.
At the end of the day we need government to act.
I think we have to develop something that can be called AI literacy,
where people really know everything that they see online
can be manipulated, can be fake.
And we as social media users also have to take some responsibility.
With the rise of artificial intelligence, there's one thing we can all do.
Don't trust everything you see and always double check
content before sharing.
So have you come across any AI fakes
that could affect elections or politics in your country?
Let us know in the comments section below
or e-mail us at factchecking@dw.com.