New technology tools have powerful potential to dramatically alter the public’s perception of political candidates, and experts say artificial intelligence manipulation of images and videos will be a deciding factor in the 2024 presidential election.
The candidate who best harnesses new generative artificial intelligence products will have an advantage that will be difficult to overcome for those who stick with traditional politicking, they say.
The advent of social media apps helped transform newbie Sen. Barack Obama and celebrity businessman Donald Trump into leaders of the free world. Now, the 2024 AI race is whipping into high gear.
When President Biden formally announced his reelection run, the Republican Party responded with an attack ad branded with a label saying it was “built entirely with AI imagery.” It was perhaps the first time a major political party relied solely on AI tools in an ad.
The “Beat Biden” video imagines a dystopian world in a hypothetical second term for Mr. Biden, with sirens blaring as a narrator says China has invaded Taiwan, followed by the announcement of closed banks, a southern border overrun by immigrants and the shuttering of San Francisco because of rampant crime.
“What if the weakest president we’ve ever had were reelected?” the ad says over AI-generated images of Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris celebrating their reelection.
A recognition has set in among political consultants that voters are not ready for a total onslaught of AI-fueled political content.
The American Association of Political Consultants has condemned AI deepfake technology in political campaigns.
Deepfakes refer to content that includes manipulated or generated audio, images or videos that appear real. The AI-generated content may replicate someone’s voice, map someone’s face onto another’s body or otherwise trick an audience.
AAPC President R. Rebecca Donatelli said in May that her board unanimously agreed that deepfake AI content is a “dramatically different and dangerous threat to democracy.” The political consultants’ industry association adopted a policy prohibiting the use of deepfake generative AI content because it was contrary to the organization’s code of ethics.
The association’s new policy may give pause to campaign staffers and political activists, but is unlikely to dissuade legions of online trolls who thrive on provocation and respect no rules.
Samuel Hammond, a senior economist for the Foundation for American Innovation, studies AI policy. He said content creators outside the campaigns who use the tools will be major players who determine how voters perceive candidates.
“The real action is going to be outside of the campaigns, just the whole world of online [trolls] and people who aren’t under federal elections laws and stuff like that, just doing whatever they want,” Mr. Hammond said. “Blowing up the information space with a whole bunch of nonsense, it’s going to be hard to distinguish from reality.”
Such content is already capturing people’s imaginations. Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. used Twitter to share a viral deepfake video depicting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the character Michael Scott in “The Office” wearing a woman’s suit. The AI-manipulated clip was originally posted by the Twitter account @C3PMeme.
The former president published on Instagram an AI-powered spoof of Mr. DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign launch via Twitter. Mr. Trump’s Instagram video depicted Mr. DeSantis conversing on Twitter with the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, alongside other figures such as Adolf Hitler and the devil.
The avalanche of AI content is not limited to the absurd and satirical.
Mr. DeSantis’ rapid response team shared a video on Twitter last month featuring images of Mr. Trump embracing Dr. Anthony Fauci as part of a montage embossed with the words “Real Life Trump.” The montage includes images with markings of fakes, such as incomprehensible text and differences in the shape of an ear, according to an Agence France-Presse analysis.
A source with knowledge of the DeSantis team’s operation said the video was not an ad and Mr. Trump’s team previously posted bogus images of the Florida governor.
The failure of political campaigns to always disclose their use of AI tools in content is emerging as a distressing trend, said William T. Adler, senior technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology.
“I think it’s really a lot to ask of people — of users and voters — to burden all of the responsibility of detecting when images are synthetic,” Mr. Adler said. “Because there are some tells in those images, but this technology is just going to keep getting better.”
AI technologists are aware of the potential problems of using their tools for politicking. OpenAI, the developer of the popular chatbot ChatGPT, disallowed the use of its AI models for political campaigning, according to a March update of its usage policies.
Elected officials, meanwhile, are eager to make new AI rules, which may ultimately shape the tools’ use in future campaigns.
Mr. Biden’s White House is crafting a national AI strategy, and Senate Democrats are leading efforts to author regulations from Capitol Hill.
At the state level, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has signed legislation mandating a notification when manipulated media, such as deepfakes, are used for political campaigns.
Mr. Inslee, a Democrat and a failed 2020 presidential candidate, signed the bill in May. It requires the disclosure to be placed on manipulated media in text, audio and visual content.
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