Deepfaking it: America’s 2024 election collides with AI boom
“Iactually like Ron Desantis a lot," Hillary Clinton reveals in a surprise online endorsement video. "He's just the kind of guy this country needs, and I really mean that."
Joe Biden finally lets the mask slip, unleashing a cruel rant at a transgender person. "You will never be a real woman," the president snarls.
Welcome to America's 2024 presidential race, where reality is up for grabs.
The Clinton and Biden deepfakes — realistic yet fabricated videos created by AI algorithms trained on copious online footage - are among thousands surfacing on social media, blurring fact and fiction in the polarised world of US politics.
While such synthetic media has been around for several years, it's been turbocharged over the past year by of a slew of new "generative AI" tools such as Midjourney that
make it cheap and easy to create convincing deepfakes, according to Reuters interviews with about two dozen specialists in fields including
AI, online misinformation and political activism.
"It's going to be very difficult for voters to distinguish the real from the fake. And you could just imagine how either Trump supporters or Biden supporters could use this technology to make the opponent look bad," said Darrell West, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Technology Innovation.
"There could be things that drop right before the election that nobody has a chance to take down."
Tools that can generate deepfakes are being released with few or imperfect guardrails to prevent harmful misinformation as the tech sector engages in an AI arms race, said Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Human Technology, a nonprofit that studies technology's impact on society.
Former president Donald Trump, who will vie with Desantis and others for the Republican nomination to face Biden, himself shared a doctored video of CNN anchor Anderson Cooper earlier this month on his social media platform Truth Social. "That was president Donald J. Trump ripping us a new a ***** here on CNN'S live presidential townhall," Cooper says in the footage, although the words don't match his lip movement.
CNN said the video was a deepfake. A representative for Trump didn't respond to a request for comment on the clip, which was still on his son Donald Jr's Twitter page this week.
There have been three times as many video deepfakes of all kinds and eight times as many voice deepfakes posted online this year compared to the same time period in 2022, In total, about 500,000 video and voice deepfakes will be shared on social media sites globally in 2023, Deepmedia estimates. Cloning a voice used to cost $10,000 in server and Ai-training costs up until late last year, but now startups offer it for a few dollars, it says.