HOW FAR WILL AI GO?
Abbin Theepura, a veteran political consultant who has worked extensively with social media, says that AI technologies are still “nascent”. More than synthetic media, the challenge today is the automating of distribution of content through microtargeting, something tech firms have already been working on perfecting for a decade. “It’s not like AI is helping me automate the content,” says Theepura. “That still needs to be generated in the first place.”
Political observers are, however, looking closely at what the BJP, in particular, might get up to, for a simple reason: the party’s early lead on using technology in past elections. The BJP’s welldocumented and extensive use of social media was underway even in the 2014 elections, before smartphone penetration was anywhere near the levels today. Opposition parties have had to play catchup in the following years. If nothing else, what kind of experiments the ruling party runs will be useful in assessing what techniques it adds to its armoury.
Translation into multiple regional languages is obviously a big use case: while the Prime Minister has used the government’s Bhashini app to do live translations of his speech at a meeting last year, realtime speech recognition in Indian languages is not perfect, and neither is translation technology. Vetted translations synthesised into a dub track that are distributed much after a speech has been delivered can get the message across fairly cheaply — without ringing any alarm bells a la deepfakes. Jadoun says that translations are typically put through a quality analysis and manually verified before being fed into the software.
What could ultimately determine the level of impact of any sort of AIenabled campaigning tool, though, is distribution — another strength buoying the BJP with its large presence in States, offline as well as on social media. Opposition parties are at a financial disadvantage here, and they argue, suffer from retaliation that the ruling party does not. “Technology like AI conversation [phone] calls will become very common as more vendors start making them available to political parties,” says Vishnoi. “If you already have a distribution network created, it becomes very easy” to dominate the field. “The BJP has a strong and structured distribution network,” as do some other dominant regional parties, he adds. Vishnoi cites Tamil Nadu’s ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and its rival, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, as organisations that have garnered an early lead.
But opposition parties continue to remain wary of the reach and result of their messaging in the face of
Technology like AI conversation [phone] calls will become very common as more vendors start making them available. If a political party already has a distribution network created, it then becomes very easy for them to dominate the field
SAGAR VISHNOI Political consultant
Anyone with a laptop now can make this stuff [deepfakes]. You don’t need to go to a specialised agency, or even to somebody who knows code
KAREN REBELO Cofounder of factchecking website BOOM
widespread misinformation and fake news. “I can share a list of YouTube channels that are only peddling fake news day in and day out and that [are] retweeted by members of a certain political party,” says Jasmine Shah, an Aam Aadmi Party appointee chairing the Delhi government’s Dialogue and Development Commission. “But obviously no action” is taken against these. He compares this to when Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal got slapped with a defamation notice in 2019 after he retweeted a video by YouTuber Dhruv Rathee about the BJP’s IT cell. (Shah spoke in February, a month before Kejriwal was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate.)
In other words, the playing field is uneven if a party decides to play dirty. Vishnoi says it would be ideal if all political organisations came together to declare a common list of principles on AI use, such as labelling of synthetic content and avoiding depictions of opponents.
Before things get there, though, parties appear poised to see what this technology can or cannot do in furthering their ultimate objective: winning the election. “Whatever tools are coming, we will experiment,” says Theepura. Whether or not they have an impact, the AI techniques deployed this election season may well show us a glimpse of what digital campaigning will look like in the coming years.